Quotes About Slavery

historians should be doing, according to some, is condemning them and focusing on the immorality of slavery and the Founders' moral blinders.

he sincerely loathed slavery; he called it "an abominable crime" and a blot on civilization.

why did he not free his slaves?

in that moment all the painful history of four hundred years of slavery entered my body in a way it hadn't before and I broke down and sobbed, Dominique, I sobbed and realized more than ever that the white man has a lot to answer for

We slaves don't end relationships. Other people do it for us. Often we don't start them either, other people do it for us. We're encouraged to breed merely to increase the workforce.

When the waters poured into Atlantis, the rich men still screamed for their slaves.

working sugar was by far the most brutal work a slave could be assigned. Most died by the age of twenty-five from infections caused by the serrated leaves, snakebite from the venomous snakes lurking in the fields, and heat exhaustion from having to stir the cane down to syrup in vats heated underneath by flames

August first, 1834, the British freed its slaves in the West Indies. It was the beginning of slavery's end in Great Britain, and abolitionists everywhere celebrated

southern newspaper asked, "What is the difference between a Yankee violating the fugitive slave law in the North and a southern man . . . violating the law against the African slave trade in the South?

He had compared the taxation to a form of slavery and had encouraged his fellow Jews to rise up against their oppressors.

Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.

I think slavery is the next thing to hell. If a person would send another into bondage, he would, it appears to me, be bad enough to send him into hell if he could.

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.

The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.

The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.

Why was the amendment, expressly declaring the right of the people to exclude slavery, voted down? Plainly enough now, the adoption of it would have spoiled the niche for the Dred Scott decision.

With 'Underground,' we see that the wounds that we all, as a nation, inflicted upon our brothers and sisters during slavery have not been healed.

Until we really heal the wounds that we dealt with during slavery, I don't think we'll be a fully realized country.

There's injustices within our system that we inherited from this time, from slavery, and until we confront our past, we're not going to be able to heal the wounds for our future.

Furthermore, the slaves cannot be put into a more wretched situation, ourselves being judges, and the community cannot take a more lively step to escape ruin, and obtain the smiles and protection of Heaven.

In the 1930s, the government paid writers to interview 80- and 90-year-old former slaves, and I read those accounts. I came away realizing - not surprisingly - that many slave masters were sadists who spent a lot of time thinking up creative ways of hurting people.

He noted that the same summer that witnessed the Constitutional Convention saw the passage of the Northwest Ordinance barring slavery north of the Ohio River.

Slavery became the social condition of the laboring classes because it was felt that it was the natural condition of life itself. Omnis vita servitium est.

Boers lived on their slaves exactly the way natives had lived on an unprepared and unchanged nature. When the Boers, in their fright and misery, decided to use these savages as though they were just another form of animal life, they embarked upon a process which could only end with their own degeneration into a white race living beside and together with black races from whom in the end they would differ only in the color of their skin.