Slavery Quotes

I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.

The man who gives me employment which I must have or suffer that man is my master let me call him what I will.

They are slaves who fear to speak For the fallen and the weak They are slaves who dare not be In the right with two or three.

James Russell Lowell

They (the blacks) had no right which the white man was bound to respect.

Roger B. Taney

Englishmen never will be slaves they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allow them to do.

George Bernard Shaw

If you put a chain around the neck of a slave the other end fastens itself around your own.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The compact which exists between the North and the South is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell involving both parties in atrocious criminality and should be immediately annulled.

William Lloyd Garrison

House rule number nine. No roach shall drink or eat out of the good cups in the kitchen. The plastic cups are in the pantry.

La Tisha Honor

I WILL FOLLOW ANYONEAND REMIND EVERYONEOF THE SUFFERING...OF THE ENSLAVED...YAZIDI WOMEN

Widad Akreyi

YAZIDIS AND CHRISTIANS WANT TO BE FREE OF NIGHT MIST AND BEHEADING DRIFT!

Widad Akreyi

I WILL FOLLOW ANYONEAND THANK EVERYONEWHO TRIES TO MAKEA DIFFERENCE IN THE LIVESOF VULNERABLE CIVILIANS

Widad Akreyi

No ONE MENTIONS YOUR TEARS, SADNESS OR SLOW DEATH! BUT, WE FEEL YOUR FALLEN TEARS, YOUR BEHEADED BODIES, YOUR RAPED DIGNITY!

Widad Akreyi

WE KNOW YOU ARE SURROUNDED BY DARKNESS... IN THE TERROR FOREST! WE HOPE FOR MOONLIGHT!

Widad Akreyi

I WILL FOLLOW ANYONE... AND DEMONSTRATE TO EVERYONE... THAT THEIR FEAR IS GENUINE

Widad Akreyi

Compassion is a reflection of our connectedness. Your voice is need and much appreciated!

Widad Akreyi

I WILL FOLLOW ANYONE... AND BEG EVERYONE... TO HELP RESCUE ALL IMPRISONED WOMEN.

Widad Akreyi

I WILL FOLLOW ANYONE...AND REMIND EVERYONE...OF THE FATE...OF THE ENSLAVED...YAZIDI WOMEN

Widad Akreyi

SHOW THE WORLD YOUR STRONG COMPASSION: GIVE YOUR VOICE TO VOICELESS YAZIDI GIRLS!

Widad Akreyi

IT’S ALL CLEARISIS INVADES YOUR SPHEREYET NO ONE IMAGINES YOUR FEARBUT DON'T WORRYTAUSSI MELEK IS HERERESTORING LIVES NEAR

Widad Akreyi

I WILL FOLLOW ANYONE...AND BEG EVERYONE...TO BE A HERO... AND SAVE THE YAZIDI NATION

Widad Akreyi

I WILL FOLLOW ANYONEAND TELL EVERYONEHOW THEY SPONSOR...THE KILLING OF THE YAZIDI NATION

Widad Akreyi

Beheading, burying and burning humans alive are extreme acts of cruelty. Such crimes against humanity must be investigated and the guilty parties brought to justice. May ALL victims rest in peace!

Widad Akreyi

You have a chance to save lives! If you don't take it, you may regret it!

Widad Akreyi

I Will Follow Anyone And Tell EveryoneHow They Abduct...And Torture ChildrenIn the Name Of Religion

Widad Akreyi

The Purpose of life is to thrive and save lives with passion! Save Yazidis today with love and compassion!

Widad Akreyi

The slaves of today will become the tyrants of tomorrow--the proletariat overthrows the hegemon to become the hegemon itself, only to be eventually overthrown by a proto-hegemon that will in turn lose its position. It is this dizzying cycle that keeps humanity chasing the tail it lost millennia ago

Miguel Syjuco

In many ways the rise of the state was the descent of the world from freedom to slavery

Marvin Harris

George, I know you’re tired. But President Lincoln, he didn’t free us to be lazy and no good. He freed us to work hard and improve ourselves.”-George’s Grandmother.

George Dawson

Even though we are peripheral to the slavery, our action is necessary to overcome a horrific evil.

Nicholas D. Kristof

You'll see some bad things, but if you didn't see them, they'd still be happening.

Paula Fox

To be obsessed by the idea of freedom, for instance, is itself a form of slavery. Such people are in the chains of the hope of freedom, and are therefore able to do little else than struggle with them.

Idries Shah

You are not property. If you choose to leave, no one will stop you.

Elizabeth Vaughan

I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.

Octavia E. Butler

On Slavery: The saddest slap in the face is we have NO monument, no real statues or memorials, no special day of Atonement or Remembrance (NOT ONE), no thanks for 400+ years of free labor, forced servitude across the Trans-Atlantic, ass beatings, buying ourselves and families out of slavery, rape and plunder...but everyone else has monuments, special museums, and even movies. This is what America thinks of black people, so-called black president and all, who has been largely silent on this subject...we'll even celebrate Leprechauns, Easter Bunnies, and Secretary's Day before we acknowledge our history.

Brandi L. Bates

Although slavery has long been a part of human history, American chattel slavery represents a case of human trauma incomparable in scope, duration and consequence to any other incidence of human enslavement.

Joy DeGruy

The brightest skies are always foreshadowed by dark clouds

Harriet Jacobs

In accepting and defending the social institution of slavery, the Greeks were harder-hearted than we but clearer-headed; they knew that labor as such is slavery, and that no man can feel a personal pride in being a laborer. A man can be proud of being a worker – someone, that is, who fabricates enduring objects, but in our society, the process of fabrication has been so rationalized in the interests of speed, economy and quantity that the part played by the individual factory employee has become too small for it to be meaningful to him as work, and practically all workers have been reduced to laborers. It is only natural, therefore, that the arts which cannot be rationalized in this way – the artist still remains personally responsible for what he makes – should fascinate those who, because they have no marked talent, are afraid, with good reason, that all they have to look forward to is a lifetime of meaningless labor. This fascination is not due to the nature of art itself, but to the way in which an artists works; he, and in our age, almost nobody else, is his own master. The idea of being one’s own master appeals to most human beings, and this is apt to lead to the fantastic hope that the capacity for artistic creation is universal, something nearly all human beings, by virtue, not by some special talent, but due to their humanity, could do if they tried.

W.H. Auden

The oppressor is never as free as they think they are

Darnell Lamont Walker

The thing about oppression is this: when you hold someone down, you, too, have to be there to make sure they don't move.

Darnell Lamont Walker

One of them confessed to Paul that his tribe had heard stories about the fiercely cannibalistic ways of white men. Paul's first instinct was to laugh him off as a simpleminded fool. But the legend hadn't been conjured from thin air. When Paul tried to assure him that white men didn't eat black men, the man confronted him with a direct challenge: explain why they bought and sold Africans as if they were cattle, not human beings."Why do you come from nobody knows where, and carry off our men, and women, and children?" the man asked Paul. "Do you not fatten them in your far country and eat them?

Monte Reel

...I shall pledge myself to the Abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self-freed slave & because I must begin somewhere. I hear my father-in-law's response: 'Oho, fine, Whiggish sentiments, Adam. But don't tell *me* about justice! Ride to Tennessee on an ass & convince the rednecks that they are merely white-washed negroes & their negroes that they are black-washed Whites! Sail to the Old World, tell 'em their imperial slaves' rights are as inalienable as the Queen of Belgium's! Oh, you'll grow hoarse, poor & gray in caucuses! You'll be spat on, shot at, lynched, pacified with medals, spurned by backwoodsmen! Crucified! Naïve, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!' Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

David Mitchell

Look at meI am the life in a wastelandLook at meI am the slavery through the agesLook at meI am the mirror of the worldLook at meI am the illusion I’ve fought forLook at meI’m still loving youand I keep being herefor you, for me,and for what’s worth breathing

Rixa White

Life has been reduced to a series of long periods of boredom in the office punctuated by high-octane “experiences” which you can rack up on your list of things to do before you die. That’s not really living: that is slavery with the occasional circus thrown in.

Tom Hodgkinson

A few slave holders were undeniably cruel. Examples of slaves beaten to death were not common, neither were they unknown. The majority of slave holders treated their slaves well.

Glen Chambers

What is it like to be so free - so trapped, but so free? What kind of bird sings only when caught? What kind of slave outshines and rises above her master?

Courtney M. Privett

Isn't it funny how freedom is only another word for slavery?

Lionel Suggs

I am grateful, and would thank the Gods(if there were any to thank) that I have finally mastered this art of forgetting--of murdering the memory.

Caryl Phillips

He slid his hands to the back of her neck, fumbling for the necklace’s clasp. He undid it and held the chain of rubies up, red and gold in the flickering candlelight. “No shackles for us,” he said, “no matter how rich.

Susanna Fraser

A slave that acknowledges its enslavement is halfway to its liberation.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

e have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen, all for the glory of God and the good of souls. The slave auctioneer's bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave trade go hand in hand.

Frederick Douglass

in this great land of the free we call it human trafficking. And so long as we don’t partake in the luxury, ignoring slavery is of no consequence. It is much easier to look away and ignore the victims. The person who ignores slavery justifies it by quickly deducting the victim is a willing participant hampered by misfortune.

D'Andre Lampkin

Lincoln, Douglas and their contemporaries struggled to decide what the words “all men are created equal” really meant. Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln wrangled for 21 hours on seven stages. They made strategic choices and battled to gain support for different views of the future. Their powerful words changed and restricted each other. Lincoln and Douglas didn’t have answers; they had strong arguments.

Georgiann Baldino

We are slaves whose masters are dead. For we are mostly controlled by doctrines which were established centuries heretofore.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A realist is a slave to reality.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

So that originally, and Naturally, there is no such thing as Slavery. Joseph was rightfully no more a Slave to his brethren, then they were to him: and they no more Authority to Sell him, than they had to Slay him. [Genesis 37].

Samuel Sewall

His body, his mind, his soul, had, for years, served only for the profit of others. He had his own people to whom he was pledged. Three million. They were the currency of his freedom.

Colum McCann

The Irish were poor, but not enslaved. He had come here to hack away at the ropes that held American slavery in place. Sometimes it withered him just to keep his mind steady. He was aware that the essence of proper intelligence was the embrace of contradiction. And the recognition of complexity was to be balanced against the need for simplicity. He was still a slave. Fugitive. If he returned to Boston he could be kidnapped at any time, taken south, strapped to a tree, whipped. His owners. They would make a spectacle of his fame. They had tried to silence him for many years already. No longer. He had been given a chance to speak out against what had held him in chains. And he would continue to do so until the links lay in pieces at his feet.

Colum McCann

Slavery provides comfort to the oppressor. Even more than comfort, it provides power over those who witness. Slavery is, after all, a luxury. Slavery is a distraction, so long as the onlooker is not the victim. Slavery is cheap labor, an outlet for aggression, and, so we’ve learned over the years, a meaningless object to fulfill sexual desires.

D'Andre Lampkin

Common sense will tell us, thatthe power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, themost improper to defend us.

Thomas Paine

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Slavery Quotes

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