Slavery Quotes

...The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.

~ Frederick Douglass

Our guns were still strapped onto our backs, because a gun meant life. Without it there was no life in the LRA. After crossing the water and walking for a long time, there was a whisper in my heart, telling me that if we kept the guns we would get killed.I was learning to listen to this gentle voice that spoke to my heart. This time what was said was hard to accept. I didn't know how I would convince my friends to throw away what seemed to be their last hope. The voice would not leave me alone. It continued to whisper in my ears to drop the guns.

~ Grace Akallo

Under the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 emancipating the enslaved in most of Britain’s colonies, the British state agreed to pay £20 million compensation to slave owners and other beneficiaries of slavery such as mortgagees and annuitants who had financial claims secured on the enslaved.

~ Draper

..the guests milled back and forth: men stood with their heads together, discussing politics and crops, their stiff white shirts puffed and ruffled, their voices rising and falling in steadfast opinions as women of fair whispered to one another and laughed behind silk fans, occasionally calling out gaily to pull another into their ring of white shoulder flounced with satin as house niggers dipped and weaved all around them bearing trays of syllabub and sack, almost invisible as the shadows they cast

~ Pamela Jekel

As she gracefully descended down portico, the white gloved hand of the lady of the estate met the white-glove worn by a Negro footman, as a vast expanse of hoop skirt filled the carriage doorway. It was a skirt of fine white lawn with ruffles embroidered with little pink and blue flowers complete with green stems. The white trash girl looked on in amazement, involuntarily wincing at the thought of the long hours plantation slave seamstresses had devoted to decorating a dress that might only be worn a half dozen times and survive as many launderings.

~ Gwen Bistrow

He had been born into debt, as had his father and his father before him. Indenture and slavery were two words for the same thing.

~ Steven Erikson

The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin. I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remember it. I never shall forget it whilst I remember anything. It was the first of a long series of outrages, of which I was doomed to be a witness and a participant. It struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass.

~ Frederick Douglass

Abolitionism was a movement to end private slavery. Libertarianism is a movement to end private and public slavery.

~ Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

I’m sorry to pull you out of your classes, but your adviser understands,” Kitteredge said. “He’s a friend of the family.”So that’s it, Neal thought. You bought me; you own me.

~ Don Winslow

Ain't we all been hurt by slavery?

~ Ernest J. Gaines

HIt is surely certain - as certain as one can be about any historical events - that the fall of New World slavery could not have occurred if there had been no abolitionist movements. We can thus end on a positive note of willed achievement, a century’s moral achievement that may have no parallel. It is an achievement, despite its many limitations, that should help inspire some confidence in other movements for social change, for not being condemned to fully accept the world into which we are born.

~ David Brion Davis

When sin ceases to pay, we have a happy knack of finding out that it is wrong; so after a bit, when Virginia, and Georgia and the Carolinas had ceased to belong to us, we began to denounce this trade in African flesh, and to denounce it in no stinted terms.

~ W. F. Butler

And hoops, like rings aflame set to jump through for a world fit for someone elseThe cold harsh feel of steel on skin, the unloved touch of an industry used to deprave all mankind of its creativity and cast us out as a solider of fortune. Working to build an empire of dirt until the grave of another unknown warrior lays dead and buried amongst the masses of a billion unknowns before him.

~ Morris R. Gates

The subject of British abolitionism has long been controversial, complex, and even baffling. It also raises the issue of moral progress in history - whether groups of reformers and even nations can succeed in eliminating deeply entrenched forms of human oppression, and if so, by what methods, misconceptions, and under what conditions?

~ David Brion Davis

As a people, we have been tolled farther and farther away from the facts of what we have done by the romanticizers, whose bait is nothing more than the wishful insinuation that we have done no harm. Speaking a public language of propaganda, uninfluenced by the real content of our history which we know only in a deep and guarded privacy, we are still in the throes of the paradox of the “gentleman and soldier.” However conscious it may have been, there is no doubt in my mind that all this moral and verbal obfuscation is intentional. Nor do I doubt that its purpose is to shelter us from the moral anguish implicit in our racism—an anguish that began, deep and mute, in the minds of Christian democratic freedom-loving owners of slaves.

~ Wendell Berry

I will follow anyone... And tell everyone...How grateful I am...To the Western nations.

~ Widad Akreyi

What matters is that Southern slaves, at least on the larger plantations, created their own African American culture, which helped to preserve some of the more crucial areas of life and thought from white control or domination without significantly reducing the productivity and profitability of slave labor. Living within this African American culture, sustained by strong community ties, many slaves were able to maintain a certain sense of apartness, of pride, and of independent identity.

~ David Brion Davis

What matters is that Southern slaves, at least on the larger plantations, created their own AfricanAmerican culture, which helped to preserve some of the more crucial areas of life and thought from white control or domination without significantlyreducing the productivity and profitability of slave labor. Living within this African American culture, sustained by strong community ties, many slaves were able to maintain a certain sense of apartness, of pride, and of independent identity.

~ David Brion Davis

My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!

~ Frederick Douglass

Much as slavery in the United States was part of a larger Atlantic Slave System, so America’s War of Independence was an outgrowth of Europe’s Seven Years’ War — from 1756 to 1763 — and also a precursor or harbinger of the French and Haitian revolutions and of the subsequent Latin American wars for independence from Spain.

~ David Brion Davis

It was the mission of the Confederacy, ordinary whites were told, to carry out God’s design for an inferior and dependent race. Slaveholders claimed that owning slaves always entailed a duty and a burden — a duty and burden that defined the moral superiority of the South. And this duty and burden was respected by millions of nonslaveholding whites, who were prepared to defend it with their lives. That, perhaps, was the ultimate meaning of a “slave society.

~ David Brion Davis

Some Southerners effectively applied slave labor to the cultivation of corn, grain, and hemp (for making rope and twine), to mining and lumbering, to building canals and railroads, and even to the manufacture of textiles, iron, and other industrial products. Nevertheless, no other American region contained so many white farmers who merely subsisted on their own produce. The “typical” white Southerner was not a slaveholding planter but a small farmer who tried, often without success, to achieve both relative self-sufficiency and a steady income from marketable cash crops.

~ David Brion Davis

For Southerners, a white skin was the distinguishing badge of mind and intellect. Black skin was the sign that a given people had been providentially designed to serve as menial laborers, as what Hammond called the “mudsill” class necessary to support every society.

~ David Brion Davis

The difference between a free human and a human is not the word free it's the word human , because humanity can never be caged with the chains of slavery.

~ M. Osman Baalbaki

She is a slave, with no way home.

~ Heather Demetrios

I cannot fail these girls by diverting my eyes from the invisible residue of slavery that clings to them like a shadow.

~ Marquita Burke-Dejesus

And oft the blessed time foretellsWhen all men shall be free;And musical, as silver bells,Their falling chains shall be.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Earned money brings you security, borrowed money gets you slavery.

~ Amit Kalantri

No matter what chains are broken, slavery is a condition of the heart.

~ Marquita Burke-Dejesus

For most of human history people owned other people. Then, only a hundred and fifty years ago, our ancestors figured out that was a bad idea. One day we’ll figure out, or our descendants will figure out, that people owning land they don’t live on or work is a bad idea too.

~ Dennis Vickers

The free worker receives a wage; the slave an education, food, care, clothing; the money that the master spends to keep the slave is drained little by little and in detail; one hardly perceives it.1

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

We are determined to answer evil with GOOD, slavery with FREEDOM, rape with hope!We are against slavery, rape, beheading, torture, violations of human rights, corruption and misuse of religion!

~ Widad Akreyi

The hardest memory of slavery that Rialla had to bear was not the lack of freedom, it was the lack of desiring freedom.

~ Patricia Briggs

They will raise, and raise with them their mother's side.

~ Harriet Beecher Stowe

Out of slavery, freedom --yes, & roses from the pig's behind.

~ Kenneth Patchen

Men have enslaved each other since they invented gods to forgive them for doing it.

~ Seth Grahame-Smith

And they are ignorant that the purpose of the sword is to save every man from slavery.

~ Marcus Annaeus Lucanus

This was the face of slavery. To have nothing, and still have something more to lose.

~ Lalita Tademy

Then, somehow, I got caught up in one of Kevin's World War II books - a book of excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors. Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred. ... Like the Nazis, antebellum whites had known quite a bit about torture - quite a bit more than I ever wanted to learn.

~ Octavia E. Butler

It is with the oppressed, enslaved, African race that I cast in my lot; and if I wished anything, I would wish myself two shades darker, rather than one lighter.

~ Harriet Beecher Stowe