1,063 Quotes About Slavery

Often, men want money to get women, or to use women to get money, or both at the same time.

The pain of liberty is better than the pleasure of slavery.

Slavery is a sin when whites were put to the yoke, but not the African. All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man.

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

My ancestors in this hemisphere were, by law, chattel slaves. In the U.S., they were chattel slaves for two and a half centuries—at least 10 generations. I used to think I knew what that meant. Now I realize that I can’t begin to imagine the many terrible things that it must have done to them. How did they survive it all and keep their humanity? Certainly, they were never intended to keep it, just as we weren’t.

Thus far I had outwitted him, and I triumphed over it. Who can blame slaves for being cunning? They are constantly compelled to resort to it. It is the only weapon of the weak and oppressed against the strength of their tyrants.

Under the white population of the United States of America only the reactionary classes oppress the black population. Under no circumstance can they represent the workers, farmers and revolutionary intellectuals and other enlighted people who form the majority of the white population.

She didn't tell him white folks couldn't love the same as coloreds. She couldn't love the same neither though, cuz more than half of her was white.

Stokes started by explaining how often the term "servant" is used as a euphemism for "slave" in New England and how there is a presumption that Africans here were somehow "smarter" and treated better than those in the South. This misperception, he pushed, is because people don't want to remember the dehumanization. Without hesitating, he went on to say, Slavery is violent, grotesque, vulgar, and we are all implicated in how it denigrates humanity.