Quotes About Slavery

slavery would make us—and the idea—completely irredeemable. How can the shining city on the hill be capable of such evil? We would rather find comfort and safety in the lie than try to resolve this question. But, in the end, we have to allow this "innocent" idea of white America to die. It is irredeemable, but that does not mean we are too.

people who settled the country had a fatal flaw. They could recognize a man when they saw one. They knew he wasn't…anything else but a man; but since they were Christian, and since they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one's life was to say that he was not a man. For if he wasn't, then no crime had been committed. That lie is the basis of our present trouble. American

It was a place that denied the contradiction between its commitments to freedom and democracy and its practice of slavery and white supremacy.

Trump and his legions invoke a history to justify their belief in the value gap. In doing so, they stand in the long lineage of white people in the United States who have used a certain understanding of the past to reinforce the injustices of the present day. Baldwin's moral vision requires a confrontation with history—with slavery and with the ongoing consequences of the after times—shorn of the rosy tint of American innocence in order to overcome its hold on us.

Slavery would be banished from view or seen as a mistake instead of a defining institution of systemic cruelty in pursuit of profit. That history would fortify our national identity, and any attempt to confront the lie itself would be sabotaged by the fear that we may not be who we say we are. For white people in this country, "America" is an identity worth protecting at any cost. —

Freedom is ugly, but is much more beautiful than slavery.

Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil.

We are slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand-or-expire agro-industrial empire—a crackpot machine—that the specialists cannot comprehend and the managers cannot manage. Which is, furthermore, devouring world resources at an exponential rate. We are, most of us, dependent employees. …Edward Abbey (1927-1989)

Of all the featherless beasts, only man, chained by his self-imposed slavery to the clock, denies the elemental fire and proceeds as best he can about his business, suffering quietly, martyr to his madness. Much to learn.

It was resolved, That England was too pure an Air for Slaves to breathe in.

Go down, Moses,Way down in Egypt land,Tell old Pharaoh,Let my people go.

I prefer liberty with danger to peace with slavery.

The organization of society is the slavery of individuals, and its disorganization brings freedom.

The old self, in other words, is what we are by nature: slaves to sin. However, Paul says to the believers at Colossae, since you have become one with Christ you are no longer slaves to sin, for you have taken off the old man or old self that was enslaved to sin and have put on the new self

democracy can make common cause with tyranny quite well, for along with a "manly and lawful passion for equality … there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." It

Perhaps a third of the population of Italy were slaves in the late Republic—as many as three million people.

Would any one believe that I am master of slaves by my own purchase? I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living without them.

Let anti-slavery charity boxes stand uppermost among those for missionary, tract and educational purposes. On this subject, Christians have been asleep; let them shake off their slumbers and arm for the holy contest.

The existence of slavery cast the shadow of hypocrisy over the otherwise noble proclamation of the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in our Declaration of Independence.

The Confederacy was formed for the purpose of seceding from the Union because those states could not part with their rights to own slaves.

There is not only no free state which would now establish it, but there is no slave state, which, if it had had the free alternative as we now have, would have founded slavery.

Before the American Revolution there were frequent slave uprisings, and a lot of people would run away.

The buying and selling of women, girls and boys is a frightening modern day form of slavery that must be stopped.

This wise man observed that wealth is a tool of freedom. But the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.