1,063 Quotes About Slavery

The degradation, the wrongs, the vices, that grow out of slavery, are more than I can describe. They are greater than you would willingly believe. Surely, if you credited one half the truths that are told you concerning the helpless millions suffering in the cruel bondage, you at the north would not help to tighten the yoke.

I have written all of them' She shows me her work, while I look down in wonder. 'These pages, by the beginning letter of the surname.' She turns to a page with R, which is a letter I know, there at the top, she reads off, 'Amalee August Rain.' I sit down beside her and she gives it over to me, an I turn through all the pages. 'I'll be,' I whisper. 'A book of lost friends.

I'd been kind to Ismene- or I thought I had, but perhaps no kindness was possible between owner and slave, only varying degrees of brutality?

It was an honor to lift this burden and so the burden was light.

A plantation was a plantation; one might think one's misfortunes distinct, but the true horror lay in their universities.

If you think taking the master's tools away from the slave is a difficult task, try taking away the master.

Ironically, slavery's burdens - all that that she suffered while working with different yet demanding families - turned Harriet into a warrior, a warrior who was ready to slay the dragon of human bondage.

For enslaved people who had spent their entire lives under the shadow of the whip, without any military training of experience with guns, to one day pick up a firearm or a machete or even a rock and oppose a superior force must have taken an extraordinary level of nerve. The thirst for liberty was powerful enough to overcome even the fear of probable death.

In the slave narrative of Moses Grandy, an especially brutal form of whipping is described in which the woman was required to lie on the ground with her stomach positioned in a hole, whose purpose was to safeguard the fetus (conceived as future slave labor).