Slavery Quotes

From the neglect of a real duty, she became the slave of a false one.

~ George Macdonald

Do you know what guerrillas often say? They claim that their rebellions are invulnerable to economic warfare because they have no economy, that they are parasitic on those they would overthrow. The fools merely fail to access the coin in which they must inevitably pay. The pattern is inexorable in its degenerative failures. You see it repeated in the systems of slavery, of welfare states, of caste-ridden religions, of socializing bureaucracies -- in any system in which creates and maintains dependencies. Too long a parasite and you cannot exist without a host.

~ Frank Herbert

No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free.

~ Yaa Gyasi

White liberals, instead of comparing what has happened to the black family since the liberal welfare state policies of the 1960s were put into practice, compare black families to white families and conclude that the higher rates of broken homes and unwed motherhood among blacks are due to “a legacy of slavery.” But why the large-scale disintegration of the black family should have begun a hundred years after slavery is left unexplained. Whatever the situation of the black family relative to the white family, in the past or the present, it is clear that broken homes were far more common among blacks at the end of the twentieth century than they were in the middle of that century or at the beginning of that century —even though blacks at the beginning of the twentieth century were just one generation out of slavery. The widespread and casual abandonment of their children, and of the women who bore them, by black fathers in the ghettos of the late twentieth century was in fact a painfully ironic contrast with what had happened in the immediate aftermath of slavery a hundred years earlier, when observers in the South reported desperate efforts of freed blacks to find family members who had been separated from them during the era of slavery.

~ Thomas Sowell

Somewhat paradoxically, the more that Africans and their descendants assimilated cultural materials from colonial society, the less human they became in the minds of the colonists.

~ Cedric J. Robinson

It should be held as an eternal truth, that what is morally wrong can never be politically right.

~ Hannah More

What a world it is, Cora thought, that makes a living prison into your only haven. Was she out of bondage or in its web: how to describe the status of a runaway?

~ Colson Whitehead

Who said slavery is over? We all are slaves, either you work for your self or for someone ealse

~ Beta Metani' Marashi

Slavery was, in fact, a social system designed to destroy social capital among slaves and between slaves and freemen.

~ Robert D. Putnam

For all intents and purposes, the freedom America preaches is a hoax, it is fiction, just like their movies. People of colour in America are no where near free. They walk around without chains but they are everywhere in chains.

~ Magnus Nwagu Amudi

White man trying to kill you slow every day, and sometimes trying to kill you fast. Why make it easy for him? That was one kind of work you could say no to.

~ Colson Whitehead

If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery--skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.

~ Saidiya V. Hartman

The most prevalent form of slavery is being a slave of your own insecurities Or exploiting another's vulnerabilities. Lust, greed and anger are the pitfalls of the short sighted. Long term business is not possible through lust, greed, anger or guile; it is done based on 'sustainable' relationships; And that is possible when happiness is your goal and each individual you transact with, is a 'strong adult Individual'. We need to invest in ourselves to make us one and in others to help them become the same. It IS in my Selfish interest to have strong, adult individuals around!

~ Amit Chatterjee

A hostage?They used the word slave, but isnt' it the same thing? Isn't that what you'd call it if someone stole me and put me in a house and wouldn't let me leave? Isn't it?

~ Tiffany Reisz

I do not think I was a hothead—not then and not now. I thought I was right. I had read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bible. Segregation seemed evil from the time I was a boy. Slavery is an abomination on the American soul, ineradicable stain on our body politic. But Penn Center lit a fire that has never gone out, and the election of President Barack Obama was one of the happiest days of my life.

~ Pat Conroy

The song just started again, and now I sang it, too. These strong hands belong to you... I found a place between two men. The first was about my age, maybe a little younger, with high cheekbones and small eyes. The other was middle-aged, with a wide forehead and bulb nose, and beside him was a man with a striking face, a square, dimpled chin and high cheekbones... and then there was another, and another--all the kinds of faces in all the colors the world calls black: brown and tan and yellow and orange, copper and bronze and gold. These strong hands belong to you... They sang--we sang--with no enthusiasm or joy. We used to sing at Bell's, crossing the yard or working on the pile, just like slaves used to sing in Old Slavery, spirituals and work songs, sly lyrics, silly lyrics, yearning for freedom or roasting Massa in nonsense words he couldn't understand. This, though--this was a different kind of singing. I looked from man to man, and they were singing mechanically, eyes front, mouths moving like puppets. Singing this dumb refrain about how much they loved their bosses and loved their work.Nothing spiritual about this. This was something else altogether.

~ Ben H. Winters

Slavery, that was a kind of alchemy for such White folk, or so they reckoned. They calculated a way of turning each bead of a Black man's sweat into gold and each moan of despair from a Black woman's throat into the sweet clear sound of a silver coin ringing on the money-changer's table. There was buying and selling of souls in that place. Yet there was nary a one of them who understood the whole price they paid for owning other folk.

~ Orson Scott Card

In history, the bleeding from arbitrary beatings, forced breedings, and choked-heatbreathing could almost be withstood by soul-feeding songs sung, or listlessly hummed just to go on.

~ Kristen Henderson

You ever think about the noose?''I been thinking about the noose since I was born.

~ Stacey Lee

Did you know that even 50 years after all other countries had abolished slavery, the Netherlands refused to?

~ Dauglas Dauglas

Just as the Netherlands was the last country to abolish slavery, they are still the last one opulently celebrating racism; the English had to force the Dutch to abolish slavery in the late 19th century and now the US and the UN are forcing them to stop celebrating bigotry in the 21st century

~ Dauglas Dauglas

South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.

~ James Louis Petigru

What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity.

~ Frederick Douglass

If I say you are not free to associate with me, it also means I too am not free to associate with you. I might call you the slave but not less bound by the slavery I have created.- Prince Ikan

~ Ray Anyasi

By law, a slaw was three-fifths of a person. It came to me that what I’d just suggested would seem paramount to proclaiming vegetables equal to animals, animals equal to humans, women equal to men, men equal to angels. I was upending the order of creation. Strangest of all, it was the first time thoughts of equality had entered my head, and I could only attribute it to God, with whom I’d lately taken up and who was proving to be more insurrectionary than law-abiding.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

The biggest thing the white man takes from us ain’t our bodies. He takes our voices, too. He swallows up our yes’s and no’s like biscuits. But one day our yes’s and no’s will be so loud and strong they will lodge in his throat. He will have to spit them out to keep from choking. He will starve. There won’t be nothing left of him except the shadows he casts on the deadest night.

~ Jonathan Odell

We're becoming slaves; the war scatters us in all directions, takes away everything we own, snatches the bread from out of our mouths; let me at least retain the right to decide my own destiny, to laugh at it, defy it, escape it if I can. A slave? Better to be a slave than a dog who thinks he's free as he trots along behind his master. She listened to the sound of men and horses passing by. They don't even realise they're slaves, she said to herself, and I, I would be just like them if a sense of pity, solidarity, the spirit of the hive forced me to refuse to be happy.

~ Irène Némirovsky

Man cannot be reduced to slavery if he is not distorted first. The politician and the priest have been in a deep conspiracy down the ages. They have been reducing humanity to a crowd of slaves. They are destroying every possibility of rebellion in man—and love is rebellion, because love listens only to the heart and does not care a bit about anything else.

~ Osho

Ah, if he had ever been a slave he would have known how difficult it was to trust white men.

~ Harriet Jacobs

Although it would lead me to believe otherwise, fear has little interest in intimidating me. Rather, it much prefers to enslave me.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

For my part, I should prefer death to hopeless bondage.

~ Frederick Douglass

I'm thinking 'tis only slaves do be giving heed to the day that's gone or the day to come.

~ Eugene O'neill

The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness.

~ Frederick Douglass

It may seem a simple pleasure to spoil our children with a treat of sugar, but that pleasure becomes a sin when the sugar was grown by human beings held in unspeakable misery.

~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Ah, if he had ever been a slave he would have known how difficult it was to trust a white man.

~ Harriet Jacobs

Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

You actually abolish slavery by accompanying the slave. We don't strategize our way out of slavery, we solidarize, if you will, our way toward its demise. We stand in solidarity with the slave, and by doing so, we diminish slavery's ability to stand.

~ Gregory Boyle

And what is that religion that sanctions, even by its silence, all that is embraced in the 'Peculiar Institution'? If there can be any thing more diametrically opposed to the religion of Jesus, than the working of this soul-killing system - which is as truly sanctioned by the religion of America as are her minsters and churches - we wish to be shown where it can be found.

~ Sojourner Truth

There is the Barclays Bank. The Barclay brothers are dead. The human beings they traded, the human beings who to them were only commodities, are dead. It should not have been that they came to the same end, and heaven is not enough of a reward for one or hell enough of a punishment for the other. People who think about these things believe that every bad deed, even every bad thought, carries with it its own retribution. So do you see the queer thing about people like me? Sometimes we hold your retribution.

~ Jamaica Kincaid

Slavery has not been abolished, it has been sanitized

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana