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Quotes About Slavery

Difficult as it was to hear, slavery has benefited descendants like me - I believe there is a superior athletic gene in us.
~ Michael Johnson
I suppose I have had more advantages and privileges than most of you, who are slaves have ever known, and I believe more than many white people have enjoyed, for which I desire to bless God, and pray that he may bless those who have given them to me.
~ Jupiter Hammon
There's no question that Stalin broke the agreements made at Yalta completely about elections that were supposed to be held immediately in Poland, and Eastern Europe was plunged into slavery as a consequence.
~ Mark Shields
Nor was it only from the millions of slaves that chains had been removed; the whole nation had been in bondage; free speech had been suppressed.
~ Matthew Simpson
You should see what our Founding Fathers used to say to each other and in the early part of our nation. But what they were able to do, especially in Philadelphia in 1787, four months, they argued about what a House should be, what a Senate should be, the power of the president, the Congress, the Supreme Court. And they had to deal with slavery.
~ Colin Powell
Some have been ensnared in the net of excessive debt. The net of interest holds them fast, requiring them to sell their time and energies to meet the demands of creditors. They surrender their freedom, becoming slaves to their own extravagance.
~ Joseph B. Wirthlin
While the old spiritual 'Slavery Chain Done Broke at Last' was sung by blacks in the hours following the Appomattox surrender, racism sadly continues to be a crippling national scourge.
~ Douglas Brinkley
The census, they argued, was an abomination. It was affirmation of the slavery of the Jews. To be voluntarily tallied like sheep was, in Judas's view, tantamount to declaring allegiance to Rome. It was an admission that the Jews were not the chosen tribe of God but the personal property of the emperor.
~ Reza Aslan
When I was growing up here, slavery was hardly ever mentioned," said Regina. "Or people would say that the slaves were happy and well looked after, and the Civil War was about states' rights and honor. You still hear that, of course, but we are finally making some progress. The best thing we can do about our awful history is to acknowledge it openly and honestly.
~ Richard Grant
There were no slaves in Natchez," she insisted haughtily. "We had field hands on our plantations, of course, but they were out of town or across the river. Here in Natchez, we had servants and we loved them. They were part of our families.
~ Richard Grant
By tracing paternal ancestry through Y-DNA, geneticists have found that a third of African American men today are directly descended from a white male ancestor who fathered a mulatto child in the slavery era, "most probably from rape or coerced sexuality," in the words of Henry Louis Gates Jr., professor of African American studies at Harvard, and presenter of popular television shows on black genealogy.
~ Richard Grant
White and black citizens are bound together in the most fundamental way possible—at the level of the genome," he writes, and yet divided by the racial pseudoscience originally devised to justify slavery and perpetuated in slightly shifting forms ever since.
~ Richard Grant
The Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Melville—the masters of the King's English all promoted the easy imagery of black as vile and white as purity and thereby fed a deep and potent racism that well served all who would enslave the black men of Africa.
~ Richard Kluger
Will knew from Angie that the girls seldom got to keep any cash. The pimps took care of their living quarters, their food, their clothes. All the girls had to do was risk their lives and health every night by tricking whatever john pulled up with the right amount of cash. It was modern slavery, which was ironic, considering most if not all of the pimps were black.
~ Karin Slaughter
The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.
~ Karl Marx
The bloody mire of Mongolian slavery, not the rude glory of the Norman epoch, forms the cradle of Muscovy, and modern Russia is but a metamorphosis of Muscovy.
~ Karl Marx
The purchase and sale of slaves is also in its form a purchase and sale of commodities. Without the existence of slaves, however, money cannot fulfil this function. If there is slavery, then money can be spent on the acquisition of slaves. But money in the hand of the buyer is in no way a sufficient condition for the existence of slavery.
~ Karl Marx
Para cultivarse espiritualmente con mayor libertad, un pueblo necesita estar exento de la esclavitud de sus propias necesidades corporales, no ser ya siervo del cuerpo.
~ Karl Marx
Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.
~ Karl Marx
Easier were it To hurl the rooted mountain from its base, Than force the yoke of slavery upon men Determin'd to be free.
~ Robert Southey
True, it is evil that a single man should crush the herd, but see not there the worse form of slavery, which is when the herd crushes out the man.
~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Good slaves are free, but bad free men are slaves of many passions.
~ Bion of Borysthenes
Wide-sounding Zeus takes away half a man's worth on the day when slavery comes upon him.
~ Homer
Men fearing their innate power, pushed woman back into slavery.
~ Frederick Lenz