Quotes About Slavery

A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production and the wage slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer.

Scratch any fortune and you'll find blood only a generation or two back...child labor in mines or mills...Slavery. Drugs. Stock swindles. Wasting nature with clear-cuts, pollution, harvesting to extinction. Monopolies. Disease. War. Every fortune comes out of something unpleasant.

You study any pretty democracy, from the ancient Greeks forward, and you'll see that the only way each system functions is with a working class of slaves. Peons to haul the garbage so the upper crust can campaign and vote.

Nuestro deber es enseñar a esos hombres y mujeres la libertad a través de la esclavitud; y el coraje a través del miedo.

The fruit of too much liberty is slavery.

Capitalism, like feudalism and slavery before it, is the most enduring, insidious and compelling structure by which a parasitic minority of aristocratic families gets to monopolize life as you know it, and doom You People, the majority, to an insectoid life of debt slavery in office cubicles.

That's not fair! Life's not fair, Kaspar. You know that. You had a slave for — how long? Twelve years. Did you treat him 'fairly'? No, of course not. You beat him when you were in a bad mood, because it made you feel better, and when you felt better you beat him some more.

From the hell of the slave quarters would come some of the Deep South's great gifts to the continent: blues, jazz, gospel, and rock and roll, as well as the Caribbean-inspired foodways today enshrined in Southern-style barbeque joints from Miami to Anchorage.

In America the quirk was that people were things. Best to cut your losses on an old man who won't survive a trip across the ocean. A young buck from strong tribal stock got customers into a froth. A slave girl squeezing out pups was like a mint, money that bred money. If you were a thing—a cart or a horse or a slave—your value determined your possibilities.

No, Fulton was colored. She understands this luminous truth. Natchez did not lie about that: she has seen it in the man's books, made plain by her new literacy. In the last few days she has learned how to read, like a slave does, one forbidden word at a time.

Cora read the accounts of slaves who had been born in chains and learned their letters. Of Africans who had been stolen, torn from their homes and families, and described the miseries of their bondage and then their hair-raising escapes. She recognized their stories as her own. They were the stories as her own. They were the stories of all the colored people she had ever known, the stories of black people yet to be born, the foundations of their triumphs.

Slavery as a moral issue never interested Ethel. If God had not meant for Africans to be enslaved, they wouldn't be in chains.

When the slaves finished, they had stripped the fields of their color. It was a magnificent operation, from seed to bale, but no one of them could be prideful of their labor. It had been stolen from them. Bled from them.

Then it comes, always—the overseer's cry, the call to work, the shadow of the master, the reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude. The

Slavery is a sin when whites were put to the yoke, but not the African. All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man. Under

The peculiar institution made Cora into a maker of lists as well. In her inventory of loss, people were not reduced to sums, but multiplied by their kindnesses.

The underground railroad maintained no lines to speak of. The decoys in negro dress, the secret codes in the back pages of newspapers. They openly bragged of their subversion, hustling a slave out the back door as the slave catchers broke down the front. It was a criminal conspiracy devoted to theft of property, and Ridgeway suffered their brazenness as a personal slur.

overseers and bosses had increased their scrutiny and would be extra vigilant on the full moon, the white beacon that so often agitated the slave with a mind to run.

She was sure he had claimed a hundred and one years at his last party. He was only half that, which meant he was the oldest slave anyone on the two Randall plantations had ever met. Once you got that old, you might as well be ninety-eight or a hundred and eight. Nothing left for the world to show you but the latest incarnations of cruelty.

I don't get where it says, He that stealeth a man and sells him, shall be put to death," Cora said. "But then later it says, Slaves should be submissive to their masters in everything—and be well-pleasing." Either it was a sin to keep another as property, or it had God's own blessing. But to be well-pleasing in addition? A slaver must have snuck into the printing office and put that in there.

That was Sea Island cotton the slaver had ordered for his rows, but scattered among the seeds were those of violence and death, and that crop grew fast. The whites were right to be afraid. One day the system would collapse in blood. An insurrection of one. She smiled for a moment, before the facts of her latest cell reasserted themselves. Scrabbling in the walls like a rat. Whether in the fields or underground or in an attic room, America remained her warden.

The ruthless engine of cotton required its fuel of African bodies. Crisscrossing the ocean, ships brought bodies to work the land and to breed more bodies. The

Federal Writers' Project, which collected the life stories of former slaves in the 1930s.

Slavery as a moral issue never interested Ethel. If God had not meant for Africans to be enslaved, they wouldn't be in chains. She did, however, have firm ideas about not getting killed for other people's high-minded ideas.