1,063 Quotes About Slavery

Some things are not worth dying for, but without them life is not worth living.

The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading subjugation on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it: for man is an imitative animal.

...In the end, there's no sort of difference between dying from ignorance and dying under the feet of thousands of men who have regained their freedom. You close your eyes, and then there's nothing anymore. And death is never difficult. It requires neither a hero nor a slave. It eats what it's served.

In modern states, the citizen is politically impotent. A citizen, it is true, may complain, make suggestions, or cause disruptions, but in the ancient world these were privileges that belonged to any slave.

No one nominated Harriet Tubman to her purpose, to her courage, to her mission. She did not say 'I am not a congressperson or the president, so how could I possibly participate in the fight to abolish a system as big as slavery?' She instead spent ten years making nineteen trips freeing 300 people. One person at a time.

When you have been a possession,then you really understand what freedom meansin all its magnificent terror.

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

I had chosen freedom, with all its insecurities, and nothing in the world would make me turn away from it.

Like its value, money’s ability to control others, or to make them envious, is not affected by how it was made.