1,063 Quotes About Slavery

Although it would lead me to believe otherwise, fear has little interest in intimidating me. Rather, it much prefers to enslave me.

Are you going to cater to the whims and prejudices of people who have no intelligent knowledge of what they condemn?

For my part, I should prefer death to hopeless bondage.

I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.

The greatest obstacle to liberty is not the existence of evil rulers, but the belief in the existence of good rulers.

A man in chains need not be a slave. If he has pride and self-respect he is a free man though a prisoner, and a constant danger to his jailers. Conversely, a slave who escapes is not a free man, but a runaway slave who may be caught and returned to servitude. A slave is one who accepts the identity ascribed to him by a master: "You are an inferior and unworthy person and so will remain, and therefore must serve me with obedience and humility.

The biggest thing the white man takes from us ain’t our bodies. He takes our voices, too. He swallows up our yes’s and no’s like biscuits. But one day our yes’s and no’s will be so loud and strong they will lodge in his throat. He will have to spit them out to keep from choking. He will starve. There won’t be nothing left of him except the shadows he casts on the deadest night.

It may seem a simple pleasure to spoil our children with a treat of sugar, but that pleasure becomes a sin when the sugar was grown by human beings held in unspeakable misery.

When evil rules a time and place, certain good people are called upon to tell the truth to those who don't want to hear it.