Slavery Quotes

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Oppression not only makes a wise man mad, it robs him also of his self-respect. And this is our loss; but having emerged from slavery, it is our duty to cast off its grave-clothes and resist its deadly influences.

Alexander Crummell

My first recollection of hearing Wendell Phillips is from my college days, though of course he was always one of my heroes, and I may have heard him before, for we were an anti-slavery family.

George Edward Woodberry

Long time men lay oppress'd with slavish fear Religion's tyranny did domineer... At length a mighty one of Greece began To assert the natural liberty of man, By senseless terrors and vain fancies let To slavery. Straight the conquered phantoms fled.

My principal objections to orthodox religion are two: slavery here and hell hereafter.

Robert G. Ingersoll

By a plan known over to Providence, the stolen sons and daughters of Africa helped to awaken the conscience of America. The very people traded into slavery helped to set America free. My nation's journey toward justice has not been easy and it is not over. The racial bigotry fed by slavery did not end with slavery or with segregation, and many of the issues that still trouble America have roots in the bitter experience of other times. But however long the journey, our destination is set: liberty and justice for all.

I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. 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

I was paralyzed. Paralyzed. Yes, I had a mouth, but I didn't have a voice. I had legs, but I couldn't move. I had arms, but I couldn't lift them up to you. It took a man to do these things, and I wasn't a man. I was just some other brutish animal who could cheat, steal, rob, kill—but not stand.... They had branded that in us from the time of slavery.

Ernest J. Gaines

The "Negro Problem" and the "White Man's Burden" are historical misnomers.. The Black Man's Burden, simply stated, was slavery and colonialism.

John Oliver Killens

The truth is that the whole life of the worker is simply a continuous and dismaying succession of terms of serfdom - voluntary from the juridical point of view but compulsory in the economic sense - broken up by momentarily brief interludes of freedom accompanied by starvation; in other words, it is real slavery.

Mikhail Bakunin

Shatter the icons of slavery and fear.
Replace
the leer
of the minstrel's burnt-cork face
with a proud, serene
and classic bronze of Benin.

By the Law of Slavery, man, created in the image of God, is divested of the human character, and declared to be a mere chattel.

Enthusiasm, being the infirmity of bold and ambitious tempers, is naturally accompanied with a spirit of liberty; as superstition,on the contrary, renders men tame and abject, and fits them for slavery.

Black women survived the rigors of slavery to demand the rights of their race and of their sex. They rose above the most demeaning forms of labor and demanded to be called by their last names. Black women forged humane communities out of rough settlements. They converted the rock of double oppression into a steppings tone.

B. Hussein Obama said he was for slavery reparations in many forms, but the only one that got applause was for more "investment" in schools. In Obama's defense, the precise question was: "But is African-Americans ever going to get reparations for slavery?" So a switch to the subject of education was only natural.
Moreover, a question on reparations has got to be confusing when you're half-white and half-black. What do you do? Demand an apology for slavery and money from yourself? I guess biracial reparations would involve sending yourself money, then sending back a portion of that money to yourself, minus 50 percent in processing fees — which is the same way federal aid works.

The wretchedness of being colonized was not that slavery created feelings of guilt and indebtedness... ; nor that it created a long, lurid dream of multiplicity and separateness, which it did indeed create, but the fact that men had epidermalized Being.

Charles R. Johnson

Every time that a people which has long crouched in slavery and ignorance is moved to its lowest depths there appear monsters and heroes, prodigies of crime and prodigies of virtue.

Alphonse de Lamartine

I hold that that is a false logic which talks about good slaveholders.... It is folly for us to talk about the slaveholders being kind. Cruelty is part and parcel of the system. If slavery is right at all, then all its terrors and horrors,—the whip, the manacle, the thumbscrew, the paddle, the stake, the gibbet—are right also; if it is not right, then all these are wrong.

J. Sella Martin

I can speak of slavery only so far as it came under my own observation - only so far as I have known and experienced it in my own person.

Solomon Northup

Read the preamble to the Constitution: it is simply unjust to ask the black community to bear all of the consequences of the transition from slavery and a segregated society to a nonsegregated society on the theory that the present-day white majority has lithe connection to its slaveholding and segregated past and that the sins of its fathers should not be visited upon it today.

Constance Baker Motley

The protection of the masses has in all times been the pretense of tyranny - the plea of monarchy, of aristocracy, of special privilege of every kind. The slave owners justified slavery as protecting the slaves.

Because of its exceptional capacity for self-criticism, the West took the initiative in abolishing slavery; the calls for abolition did not resonate even in black Africa, where rival African tribes took black prisoners to be sold as slaves in the West.

I am an opponent of war and of war preparations and an opponent of universal military training and conscription; but entirely apart from that issue, I hold that segregation in any part of the body politic is an act of slavery and an act of war.

Let there be an SU(5) Yang-Mills theory with all its gauge bosons, let the symmetry be broken down spontaneously, and let all but one of the remaining massless gauge bosons be sold into infrared slavery. That one last gauge boson is my favorite. Let him rush forth to illuminate all of my creations!

There must be no compromise with slavery - none whatever. Nothing is gained, everything is lost, by subordinating principle to expedience.

William Lloyd Garrison

My inclination is to whip the rebellion into submission, preserving all Constitutional rights. If it cannot be whipped any other way than through a war against slavery, let it come to to that legitimately. If it is necessary that slavery should fall that the Republic may continue its existence, let slavery go.

Ulysses S. Grant