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Slavery Quotes

Right now I'm thinking a good deal about emancipation. One of our sins was slavery, another was eman...

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The cliche about prison life is that I am actually integrated into it, ruined by it, when my accommo...

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The “pursuit of happiness” is such a key element of the “American (ideological) dream” that one tend...

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Nevermore shall men make slaves of others! Not in Asgard--not on Earth--not any place where the hamm...

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He had been born into debt, as had his father and his father before him. Indenture and slavery were ...

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Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master u...

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The past week, Mother had denied her a pass to the market for some minor, forgettable reason, and sh...

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By law, a slaw was three-fifths of a person. It came to me that what I’d just suggested would seem p...

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Picture of Sue Monk Kidd
Sue Monk KiddThe Invention of Wings

To condemn slavery was one thing—that I could do in my own individual heart—but female ministers!

Picture of Sue Monk Kidd
Sue Monk KiddThe Invention of Wings

Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is lif...

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You Say To People 'Throw Off Your Chains' And They Make New Chains For Themselves?

I hope you're not proposing to enslave us,' said Twoflower.Marchesa looked genuinely shocked. 'Certa...

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War, Nobby. Huh! What is it good for?" he said. "Dunno, Sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?""Absol—well, o...

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I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ...

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Picture of Theodore Parker
Theodore ParkerThe present aspect of slavery in America and the immediate duty of the North: a speech delivered in the hall of the State house

The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions,...

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Picture of Thomas Jefferson
Thomas JeffersonNotes on the State of Virginia

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

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The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated...

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Despite widespread misconceptions in the United States today that the institution of slavery was bas...

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White liberals, instead of comparing what has happened to the black family since the liberal welfare...

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Picture of Thomas Sowell
Thomas SowellBlack Rednecks and White Liberals

It takes no more research than a trip to almost any public library or college to show the incredibly...

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That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, o...

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The box had done what Sweet Home had not, what working like an ass and living like a dog had not: dr...

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And in all those escapes he could not help being astonished by the beauty of this land that was not ...

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Paul D did not answer because she didn't expect or want him to, but he did know what she meant. List...

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In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under contro...

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I have told the story I was asked to tell. I have closed it, as so many stories close, with a joinin...

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Picture of Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le GuinFour Ways to Forgiveness

Technical people don't make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.

There was not a single Negro slave owner who did not know dozens of Negroes just as capable of learn...

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Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve somebody's slavery.

I refused to teach Sunday school. When Archdeacon Henry Phillips, my last rector, died, I flatly ref...

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Picture of W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du BoisThe Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century

In accepting and defending the social institution of slavery, the Greeks were harder-hearted than we...

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There was a period when the capitalist system increased the well-being of significant numbers of peo...

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No word of commiseration can make a burden feel one feather's weight lighter to the slave who must c...

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It might seem to you that living in the woods on a riverbank would remove you from the modern world....

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In a society in which nearly everybody is dominated by somebody else's mind or by a disembodied mind...

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Picture of Wendell Berry
Wendell BerryThe Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

From other stories that have been handed down to me I know that my people, like many others in the s...

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As a people, we have been tolled farther and farther away from the facts of what we have done by the...

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How prudently most men creep into nameless graves, while now and then one or two forget themselves i...

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When I want to find the vanguard of the people I look to the uneasy dreams of an aristocracy and fin...

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Mistaking insolence for freedom has always been the hallmark of the slave.

It is said culture requires slaves. I say that no cultured society can be built with slaves. This te...

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There had been three of them once: James, then a sister named Fonsiba, then Lucas, children of Aunt ...

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

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I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I w...

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Be faithful, be vigilant, be untiring in your efforts to break every yoke, and let the oppressed go ...

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Picture of William Lloyd Garrison
William Lloyd GarrisonNarrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Fortunate, most fortunate occurrence! — fortunate for the millions of his manacled brethren, yet pan...

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Picture of William Lloyd Garrison
William Lloyd GarrisonNarrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.

Added to the shock of the routine violation of their bodies was the trauma of having to relinquish t...

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

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personall...

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As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy s...

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If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitu...

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Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God cannot retain ...

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The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of ...

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Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves

Picture of Abraham Lincoln
Abraham LincolnComplete Works - Volume XII

I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.

Picture of Abraham Lincoln
Abraham LincolnSpeeches and Letters of Abraham Lincoln

The democracy of to-day hold the liberty of one man to be absolutely nothing when in conflict with a...

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As I often say, we have come a long way from the days of slavery, but in 2014, discrimination and in...

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He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth ...

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Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they a...

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Human nature is full of riddles and contradictions; its very complexity engenders art—and by art I m...

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Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the subordination and serfdom of certain cl...

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I recollect once of having heard a gentleman from one of the northern States, of great power and abi...

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Who talks most about freedom and equality? Is it not those who hold the bill of rights in one hand a...

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Who talks most about freedom and equality? Is it not those who hold the bill of rights in one hand a...

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The free worker receives a wage; the slave an education, food, care, clothing; the money that the ma...

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These diverse effects of slavery and freedom are easily understood: … the men in Kentucky [neither] ...

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

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It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health car...

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I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.

I am chained to the earth to pay for freedom of my eyes.

Poverty makes a slave out of men. In order to eat he will accept work that gives no pleasure.

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

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Ninety-six per cent of juvenile prostitutes are fugitives from abusive domestic situations; 66 per c...

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From the first day I met her, she was the only woman to me. Every day of that voyage I loved her mor...

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That the Negroes were enslaved more than other races, and on a large scale, is evidently a result of...

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Do not consider Collectivists as "sincere but deluded idealists". The proposal to enslave some men f...

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Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group—whether to a race, class or state do...

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At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings...

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Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade...

How grossly are they mistaken in imagining slavery to be disallowed by the Alcoran! Are not the two ...

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Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed...

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All who are not lunatics are agreed about certain things. That it is better to be alive than dead, b...

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The official erasure of any existence before enslavement – as if black Americans did not exist befor...

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You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.

It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important th...

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Picture of Booker T. Washington
Booker T. WashingtonUp From Slavery: An Autobiography

And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambi...

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I am a democrat [proponent of democracy] because I believe in the Fall of Man.I think most people ar...

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But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no...

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Picture of C. S. Lewis
C. S. LewisThe Horse and His Boy

Money is not an invention of the state. It is not the product of a legislative act. Even the sanctio...

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We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Huma...

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The light on her face was a lesson, a book that she hoped he would want to read, but he looked away ...

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I am grateful, and would thank the Gods(if there were any to thank) that I have finally mastered thi...

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For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded ...

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The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece ofspecious humbug designed to conceal i...

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...A vision from a universe where the Equal Rights Amendment--with its redefinition of personhood--i...

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Private ownerships of a ...slave chip is illegal in many polities. It tends to be a government monop...

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Machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines, you are not cattle, you ar...

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see chains on another person and be glad they are not your own--such was the good fortune permitted ...

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