1,063 Quotes About Slavery

You Say To People 'Throw Off Your Chains' And They Make New Chains For Themselves?

The past week, Mother had denied her a pass to the market for some minor, forgettable reason, and she’d taken it hard. Her market excursions were the acme of her days, and trying to commiserate, I'd said, “I'm sorry, Handful, I know how you must feel.” It seemed to me I did know what it felt to have one's liberty curtailed, but she blazed up at me. “So we just the same, me and you? That's why you the one to shit in the pot and I'm the one to empty it?

My creed on the subject of slavery is short. Slavery per se is not sin. It is a social condition ordained from the beginning of the world for the wisest purposes, benevolent and disciplinary, by Divine Wisdom.

Deeds of heroism are wrought here more than those of romance, when, defying torture, and braving death itself, the fugitive voluntarily threads his way back to the terrors and perils of that dark land, that he may bring out his sister, or mother, or wife.

He says that there can be no high civilization without enslavement of the masses, either nominal or real. There must, he says, be a lower class, given up to physical toil and confined to an animal nature; and a higher one thereby acquires leisure and wealth for a more expanded intelligence and improvement, and becomes the directing soul of the lower. So he reasons, because, as I said, he is born an aristocrat;—so I don't believe, because I was born a democrat.

The slaves who were ourselves had known terror intimately, confused sunrise with pain, & accepted indifference as kindness.

Ownership breeds slavery: with every single thing that you acquire, comes a new worry of not losing that thing.

It is not the fault of the slaveholder that he is cruel, so much as it is the fault of the system under which he lives. He cannot withstand the influence of habit and associations that surround him. Taught from earliest childhood, by all that he sees and hears that the rod is for the slave's back, he will not be apt to change his opinions in maturer years.

Employment is slavery. Workers merely have a choice over where to serve their daily eight-hour sentence.