Slavery Quotes

Marriage without love is just one more twisted form of slavery.

~ Margarita Engle

In every aspect and among almost every demographic, how American society digested and processed the long, dark chapter between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the civil rights movement has been delusion.

~ Douglas A. Blackmon

One could call a master a good master because he did not whip his slaves, but ultimately he was still and owner of men, and men were not made to be owned.

~ Nick Lake

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

Inner slavery is even worse than outward slavery, and inner freedom is even better than outward freedom.

~ Kathryn Lindskoog

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 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

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

For an entrepreneur with 'improbable' and 'impossible' dreams, the alleged stability that comes from getting 'a real job' is nothing but a sign of slavery.

~ Fabrizio Moreira

When I see the Confederate flag, I see the attempt to raise an empire in slavery. It really, really is that simple. I don't understand how anybody with any sort of education on the Civil War can see anything else.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

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.

~ Andrew Young

Child slavery is a crime against humanity. Humanity itself is at stake here. A lot of work still remains, but I will see the end of child labor in my lifetime.

~ Kailash Satyarthi

Stardom can be a gilded slavery.

~ Helen Hayes

Had it not been for slavery, the death penalty would have likely been abolished in America. Slavery became a haven for the death penalty.

~ Angela Davis

To some extent I liken slavery to death.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Death is better than slavery.

~ Harriet Ann Jacobs

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

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state.

~ Thomas Sowell

The house of Austria has publicly used every effort to deprive the country of its legitimate Independence and Constitution, designing to reduce it to a level with the other provinces long since deprived of all freedom, and to unite all in a common sink of slavery.

~ Lajos Kossuth

It is a debt we owe to the purity of our religion to show that it is at variance with that law which warrants slavery.

~ Patrick Henry

Religion and slavery are incompatible.

~ B. R. Ambedkar

Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery.

~ Robert Green Ingersoll

The prolonged slavery of women is the darkest page in human history.

~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The injustices endured by black Americans at the hands of their own government have no parallel in our history, not only during the period of slavery but also in the Jim Crow era that followed.

~ Jim Webb