Quotes About Slavery

All the inhabitants of Cyprus are slaves to the Venetians," wrote the visitor Martin von Baumgarten in 1508, "obliged to pay to the state a third of all their increase or income…and which is more, there is yearly some tax or other imposed on them, with which the poor common people are so flayed and pillaged that they hardly have the wherewithal to keep soul and body together.

Despite the efforts of some Turkish historians to claim her as an ethnic Turk and a Muslim, the strong probability is that she was a Western slave, taken in a frontier raid or captured by pirates, possibly Serbian or Macedonian and most likely born a Christian – a possibility that casts a strange light on the paradoxes in Mehmet's nature.

Many of these slaveholding populists were celebrated by posterity as tribunes of the common people. Meanwhile, the self-made Hamilton, a fervent abolitionist and a staunch believer in meritocracy, was villainized in American history textbooks as an apologist of privilege and wealth.

Crittenden Plan because it would permit slavery to expand into the West. Congressman

The hypocrisy of slaveholders who revolted against Britain's oppression of them but kept slaves in America was condemned in both England and America

What distinguishes bourgeoisie society from other class societies…? Precisely the fact that class domination does not rest on "acquired rights" but on real economic relations – the fact that wage labor is not a judicial relation, but purely an economic relation… How can wage slavery be suppressed by the "legislative way", if wage slavery is not expressed [by] the laws?

That was a difference between black slaves and white indentured servants. Black slaves were usually not allowed to keep their names, but were given new names by their owners.

One famous female Sufi mystic and religious teacher was Rabi-'ah al-' Ada-wiyyah (712?801), who after a girlhood in slavery fled to the desert, where she rejected all offers of marriage and devoted herself to prayer and scholarship. Although the most distinguished of women Sufis, Rabi-'ah was not unique, since Sufism gave all women the chance to attain a holy dignity

My great-great-great-grandmother was bought at Alligator Pond.

It is not reputation, fame, success or religiosity that glorifies God, it's slavery.

marriage nothing but a lugubrious barter with slavery as its upshot.

The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable.

Of course life has no point. If it had, man would not be free, he'd become a slave to that point and his life would be governed by completely new criteria: the criteria of slavery. Like an animal, the point of whose life is that life itself, the continuation of the species. An animal carries out its slavish activities because it can feel the point of its life instinctively. Therefore its sphere is restricted. Man, on the other hand, claims to aspire to the absolute.

Off course, life has no point. If it had, man would not be free. He'd become a slave to that point and his life would be governed by completely new criteria: the criteria of slavery. Like an animal, the point of whose life is that life itself, the continuation of the species. An animal carries out his slavish activities because it can feel the point of its life instinctively. Therefore its sphere is restricted. Man, on the other hand claims to aspire to the absolute.

American Slavery, American Freedom

To live the life of Christ means to him to be delivered from the life of self; the will of Christ is to him the only path of liberty from the slavery of his own evil self-will.

All's well! You're sold into slavery! We can go, they're expecting you." "How do you mean, slavery?" "It's the way they put it here. Chechen men don't work, slaves work for them. If I'd offered them you without charge, they wouldn't have trusted me. They'd have taken you for Fed Security.

In order to find victim-centered solutions to gender-based violence, we will need to address racism, including the vestiges of colonialism and slavery, along with homophobia, misogyny and gender bias.

We are told, that the subjection of Americans may tend to the diminution of our own liberties; an event, which none but very perspicacious politicians are able to foresee. If slavery be thus fatally contagious, how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?

Considering Independence Hall was also where the founders calculated that a slave equals three-fifths of a person and cooked up an electoral college that lets Florida and Ohio pick our presidents, making an adolescent who barely spoke English a major general at the age I got hired to run the cash register at a Portland pizza joint was not the worst decision ever made there.

Parliament would abolish slavery in the British Empire in 1833, thirty years before President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. A return to the British fold in 1778 might have freed American slaves three decades sooner, which is what, an entire generation and a half? Was independence for some of us more valuable than freedom for all of us? As the former slave Frederick Douglass put it in an Independence Day speech in 1852, 'This is your Fourth of July, not mine'.

Um, I asked, isn't the whole point about being a slave that you don't have a choice to be anything else? Prettying up the word slave with the adjective-noun constructions makes enslaved African sound nonchalant. As in Those were the cabins of the jolly leprechauns.

He tried to make his lust comical, to show how absurd it all was, easily the most wretched form of human struggle, the very essence of slavery.

From Soloviëv, Mady naturally turned to Berdyaev, and while speaking of Slavery and Freedom—the concept of Sobornost—she opened the jar of pickled herring.