Quotes About Slavery

There were people in the South who were ardently opposed to slavery. And maybe, if we get into truth and reconciliation, those will be the people we want to name schools and streets after.

He had been born into debt, as had his father and his father before him. Indenture and slavery were two words for the same thing.

In my village no one is a stranger - and this is what civilization has turned it's back on. One day, Munug, I will make a world of villages, adn the age of cities will be over. And slavery will be dead, and there shall be no chains - tell your god. Tonight, I am his knight.' - Karsa Orlong.

think in terms of a continuum of influence: at one end, respectful, ethical, growth-enhancing influence that recognizes the value of individuality, human rights, and creativity; at the other end, conformity, dependency, and slavery, where all authority lies with the leader and the group.

Europeans extracted an estimated 222,505,049 hours of forced labour from African slaves between 1619 and 1865. Valued at the US minimum wage, with a modest rate of interest, that's worth $97 trillion – more than the entire global GDP.

The men and women of the North are slaveholders, those of the South slaveowners. The guilt rests on the North equally with the South.

For generations, our political life was distorted by the influence of public officials whose foremost goal was to preserve the essence, if not the form, of slavery in a segregated and discriminatory social system.

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.

I was a slave. I was sold in China in 2007 as a child at 13 years old.

It states, History should be regarded as a means for understanding the past and solving the challenges of the future. It also suggests that this celebration of the end of slavery is an important and enriching part of the history and heritage of the United States.

I have always believed, heretofore, in the doctrines of the Declaration of Independence, that all men are born free and equal; but of late it appears that some men are born slaves, and I regret that they are not black, so all the world might know them.

La llibertat és bona, diu. És millor que l'esclavitud. I el perdó és bo, millor que la revenja. I l'esperança cap a allò que és desconegut és bona, millor que l'odi al que és conegut.

The failure in reading -the omnipresent verbalism- of those who have not been trained in the arts of grammar and logic shows how lack of such discipline results in slavery to words rather than mastery of them.

But America, like every nation, has its ages of psychosis. It has fits of indecision and periods of self-delusion. Consider how presidents spoke movingly of freedom from tyranny while personally holding hundreds of men, women, and children in slavery.

That he won at all is the result of an electoral college system originally designed to protect the power of slave owners.

An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that "justify" the institution of slavery. Western economies are absolutely dependent now on the continued underpayment of women. An ideology that makes women feel "worth less" was urgently needed to counteract the way feminism had begun to make us feel worth more.

Guns and slavery grew even more intertwined in the Galton family fortune. By the 1750s, the Galtons were delivering more than twenty-five thousand guns a year to European traders, who sold the weapons to African states engaged in increasingly bloody battles. The warring states captured prisoners in the fights, and then sold them to European slave traders. Before long, they demanded to be paid for the slaves with more guns instead of gold.

If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think and feel.

Under coverture, a wife was required to live where her husband demanded, her earnings belonged to her husband and her children were the property of her husband, just as the children of the female slave belonged to her master. But perhaps the most graphic illustration of the continuity between slavery and marriage was that in England – as Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge reminds us – wives could be sold at public auctions.

We can believe in hierarchy. We can believe the universe was made just for us. Hierarchy and a major sense of entitlement are not insurmountable problems. The problem occurs when we treat those whom we believe lie beneath us as slaves. Religion once sustained human slavery. It was wrong then. When it blindly sanctions the slavery of every nonhuman animal, it is wrong now.

Family members lost to slave sales were worse than dead, as there was no peace or closure.

Although African Americans toiling in the field might be seen as the quintessential image of slavery, the more potent symbol of the system was the auction block.

More than a decade before, another young woman in her twenties, Isabella Baumfree, born a Dutch-speaking slave in rural New York, resolved her spiritual crises by running away from her master and eventually changing her name to Sojourner Truth. She seized the opportunity for emancipation in 1826

The problem was so widespread that in 1793 Congress passed the first Fugitive Slave Act.