Slavery Quotations

Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.

As I often say, we have come a long way from the days of slavery, but in 2014, discrimination and inequality still saturate our society in modern ways. Though racism may be less blatant now in many cases, its existence is undeniable.

No nation ever yet found any inconvenience from too close an inspection into the conduct of its officers, but many have been brought to ruin and reduced to slavery by suffering gradual impositions and abuses.

Slavery is nothing to joke about. The history of this nation's involvement with slavery is nothing to pass off in a joke.

Every emancipation has in it the seeds of a new slavery, and every truth easily becomes a lie.

Without peace, there is no freedom, individual or national. War and hostilities are a form of slavery.

Frederick Douglass had to teach himself how to read before standing up to defeat slavery.

From that date the abandonment of the older State proceeded with a rapidity never before known, and with it grew the domestic slave trade and the pro-slavery feeling.

I speak on due consideration because Britain, France, and Mexico, have abolished slavery, and all other European states are preparing to abolish it as speedily as they can.

What slavery really demonstrated was that we don't really know how to use energy wisely and that we can be incredibly abusive and barbaric.

Our concern, however, is with slavery as it is, and not with any theory of it.

I read a funny story about how the Republicans freed the slaves. The Republicans are the ones who created slavery by law in the 1600's. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and he was not a Republican.

As legal slavery passed, we entered into a permanent period of unemployment and underemployment from which we have yet to emerge.

In the nineteenth century, slavery was the greatest wrong, and government never stood so tall as when it was redressing that wrong.

I appeal to you, my friends, as mothers: are you willing to enslave your children? You stare back with horror and indignation at such questions. But why, if slavery is not wrong to those upon whom it is imposed?

No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery.

I do not weep: I loathe tears, for they are a sign of slavery.

There is not only no free state which would now establish it, but there is no slave state, which, if it had had the free alternative as we now have, would have founded slavery.

What we forget is that African Americans made the largest contribution to America, economically, before the Civil War of any sector of society. I read that the railroads were worth about $2 billion, but slavery was a $3 billion asset.

I am amazed at the facility with which some men follow in the wake of slavery.

I need say no more, to prove that slavery is entirely unlike the servitude in the patriarchal families.

If not now, then when? If not you, then who? If we are able to answer these fundamental questions, then perhaps we can wipe away the blot of human slavery

Slavery is illegal everywhere, but it exists all over the world.

Racism is a way to gain economic advantage at the expense of others. Slavery and plantations may be gone, but racism still allows us to regard those who may keep us from financial gain as less than equals.

And who is responsible for this appalling child slavery? Everyone.

But when you see personal artifacts relating to - by genealogy at least - a living human being, it was just more impressive to me than just about anything I've ever read about slavery before.

You cannot afford a world with slavery, which literally takes someone and turns them into a machine.

Decolonization actually boosted slavery. As foreign powers withdrew from the colonies, people were enslaved by their own countrymen. And we see it in Africa, we see it in Asia.

Sir, there is no Christian nation, thus free to choose as we are, which would establish slavery.

The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads in the Civil War and justified it.

The secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition.

I will to my dying day oppose, with all the powers and faculties God has given me, all such instruments of slavery on the one hand and villainy on the other as this Writ of Assistance is.

Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment.

I declare and protest in advance, that I do not intend, at this time at least; to be drawn or driven into the question of slavery, in either of its subdivisions or forms.

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.

The legacy of slavery comes from the sustained political, legal and economic effort to link permanently an entire group of people to poverty - and to mystify that systematic disenfranchisement by making up something called race, which could serve as a distraction.

The problem for those who assert biblical authority in support of traditional definitions of marriage is that one could, with equal validity, assert that the lending of money or certain kinds of haircuts are forbidden by God, or that slavery and the subjugation of women are authorized by the Lord.

The power of the ballot we need in sheer defense, else what shall save us from a second slavery?

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

Racism is an effect of slavery, not the other way around. Once slavery was abolished, not only did racism not disappear, neither did the economic system it upheld.

I call for a march from exploitation to education, from poverty to shared prosperity, a march from slavery to liberty, and a march from violence to peace.

True, permanent peace can never be restored, until slavery, the occasion of the war, has ceased.

Carry out the republican principle of universal suffrage, or strike it from your banners and substitute 'Freedom and Power to one half of society, and Submission and Slavery to the other.'

The compact which exists between the North and the South is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.

Slavery is the first step towards civilization. In order to develop it is necessary that things should be much better for some and much worse for others, then those who are better off can develop at the expense of others.

I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.

The sin of slavery is one of which it may be said that without the shedding of blood there is no remission.

We must continue to judge of slavery by what it is, and not by what you tell us it will, or may be.

The augmentation of slaves weakens the states; and such a trade is diabolical in itself, and disgraceful to mankind.

Racism, xenophobia and unfair discrimination have spawned slavery, when human beings have bought and sold and owned and branded fellow human beings as if they were so many beasts of burden.

Difficult as it was to hear, slavery has benefited descendants like me - I believe there is a superior athletic gene in us.

If Liberia has failed, then, it is no evidence of the failure of the Negro in government. It is merely evidence of the failure of slavery.

The proceedings of this House in 1790, in reference to petitions on the matter of the slave trade, and of slavery in the States, have been cited. It has been said that those petitions were not received.

By the law of Christ, every man is bound to love his neighbour as himself; but every servant is a neighbour of every civil lord; therefore every civil lord must love any of his servants as himself; but by natural instinct, every lord abhors slavery; therefore, by the law of charity, he is bound not to impose slavery on any brother in Christ.

In this country protection has always, to some extent, existed; but at some times it has been efficient, and at others not; and our tendency toward freedom or slavery has always been in the direct ratio of its efficiency or inefficiency.

I've heard 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' read, and I tell you Mrs. Stowe's pen hasn't begun to paint what slavery is as I have seen it at the far South. I've seen de real thing, and I don't want to see it on no stage or in no theater.

Slavery was regarded by Aristotle as an ordinance of nature, and so probably was it by the slaves themselves in olden time.

I had crossed the line. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land.

They all agree, they are all unanimous in Congress, in the States, on the rostrum, in the sanctuary - everywhere they declare that slavery shall not go into the Territories.

It, sometimes, suits the slaveholders to claim, that their slavery is an exclusively State concern; and that the North has, therefore, nothing to do with it.

In England, theres no acknowledgement the invention of slavery came from Britain.

Slavery is something that affects all of us. It's all of our history.

No slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.

We can constitutionally extirpate slavery at this time.

I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.

It is manifestly vital to the success of the anti-slavery cause, that the authority and influence of proslavery, especially of slaveholding, ministers should be destroyed.

The whole story of the comfort women, the system of forced sexual slavery, the medical experiments of Unit 731, is not something that is in the US psyche. That is changing because many books are coming out.

People-trafficking is modern day slavery. There are more slaves today than there were at the height of the slave trade.

Slavery was not a bad day on the job. It was not your boss yelling at you. It was not hard work for little pay. This was a full system of human subjugation.

If there is a State, then there is domination, and in turn, there is slavery.

You can't regulate child labor. You can't regulate slavery. Some things are just wrong.

The challenges African-Americans are facing today are rooted in the system of slavery.

I welcomed the organization of the Anti-slavery Society.

The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and to be bought for it.

The fact that slavery is written into the Constitution is about as entrenched a form of classism as you could possibly imagine.

For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.

Slavery didnt break up the black families as much as liberal welfare rules.

My first recollection of hearing Wendell Phillips is from my college days, though of course he was always one of my heroes, and I may have heard him before, for we were an anti-slavery family.

When every one of your arguments is characterized an attempt to bring back slavery or resegregate lunch counters, it's a little hard to have any sort of productive debate.

Some slaves are scoured to their work by whips, others by their restlessness and ambition.

We have the potential to help people out of poverty, out of disease, out of slavery and out of conflict. Too often, we turn the other way because we think there's nothing we can do.

Slavery, if it can be legalized at all, can be legalized only by positive legislation. Natural law gives it no aid. Custom imparts to it no legal sanction.

Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery.

This is slavery, not to speak one's thought.

The wealthy have never liked to pay for the labor that enriches them. Ever since slavery was eliminated, they have been trying to keep it as close to slavery as they can without violating the slave laws.

If you don't feel apologetic for slavery, if you don't feel apologetic for colonialism, if you feel proud of it then say that.

Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.

The history of American democracy, to say the least, has been checkered. Our nation was founded at a time when people of African descent were held in bondage. After slavery was abolished, they were forced to endure legal discrimination for another 100 years.

The married woman as family provider beside the man, often also in place of the man, but always however subservient to the man's dominion - this is the worst form of woman slavery our time has created.

Even if the Constitution of the United States had intended to recognize slavery, as a constitutional state institution, such intended recognition would have failed of effect, and been legally void, because slavery then had no constitutional existence to be recognized.

To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.

There are two things that have always haunted me: the brutality of the European traders and the stories I've heard about Africans selling other Africans into slavery.

Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man's nature - opposition to it is his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.

If the states had to vote on slavery, we would have lost the vote.

If you are living out of a sense of obligation you are slave.

Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.

You can be out of slavery and have the right to vote, but unless you have access to capital, industry and technology, you can't fulfill your dreams.

I think we must get rid of slavery or we must get rid of freedom.

The Israelites' slavery in Egypt is the equivalent of our slavery to sin. God sent Moses to deliver them from bondage, and He sent Jesus Christ to set us free.

To some extent I liken slavery to death.