Slavery Quotes - Page 24

• Slavery is malignantly aristocratic.

  Antoinette Brown Blackwell

  Aristocratic

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• If you want to be fully convinced of the abominations of slavery, go on a southern plantation, and call yourself a negro trader. Then there will be no concealment; and you will see and hear things that will seem to you impossible among human beings with immortal souls.

  Harriet Ann Jacobs

  Southern, Soul, Literature

  Harriet Ann Jacobs (1861). “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”, p.81

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• No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery.

  Harriet Ann Jacobs

  Giving, Literature, Adequate

  Harriet Ann Jacobs (1861). “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”, p.79

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• Every where the years bring to all enough of sin and sorrow; but in slavery the very dawn of life is darkened by these shadows

  Harriet Ann Jacobs

  Years, Sorrow, Shadow

  Harriet Ann Jacobs (2006). “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Literary Touchstone Classic”, p.38, Prestwick House Inc

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• How hard a thing is life to the lowly and yet how human and real is it? And all this life and love and strife and failure, - is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day? The answer lies in each of us. For somewhere in your past ... somewhere some 100 years ago?there rose from the smoldering ashes of slavery?a proud and humble family who suffered and struggled with life. A family who found the strength to endure all the indignities of life in America, and that family had the hope for a taste of her bounties in the future.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Life And Love, Lying, Real

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• The American people have entered upon the mightiest civic struggle known to their history. ... The Golden Rule is rejected by the heads of all the great departments of trade, and the law of Cain, which repudiates the obligations that we are mutually under to one another, is fostered and made the rule of action throughout the world. Corporate feudality has taken the place of chattel slavery and vaunts its power in every state.

  James B. Weaver

  Struggle, Taken, Law

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• Now as before, women must refuse to be meek and guileful, for truth cannot be served by dissimulation. Women who fancy that they manipulate the world by pussy power and gentle cajolery are fools. It is slavery to have to adopt such tactics.

  Germaine Greer

  Pussy, Fool, Tactics

  Germaine Greer (1972). “The female eunuch”

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• It would be well for those interested to reflect whether there now exists, or ever has existed, a wealthy and civilized community in which one portion did not live on the labor of another; and whether the form in which slavery exists in the South is not but one modification of this universal condition... Let those who are interested remember that labor is the only source of wealth, and how small a portion of it, in all old and civilized countries, even the best governed, is left to those by whose labor wealth is created.

  John C. Calhoun

  Country, Community, Would Be

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• God knows that I detest slavery, but it is an existing evil ... and we must endure it and give it such protection as is guaranteed by the Constitution.

  Millard Fillmore

  Evil, Giving, Constitution

  Millard Fillmore (1970). “Millard Fillmore Papers”

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• Hatred, slavery's inevitable aftermath.

  Jose Marti

  Hatred, Aftermath, Inevitable

  "Woman Suffrage". Essay by Jose Marti, 1887.

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• We must look at the institution of slavery as publicists, and not as casuists. It is a question of law, and not a case of conscience.

  Roger Brooke Taney

  Law, Looks, Institutions

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• I can never acknowledge the right of slavery. I will bow down to no deity however worshipped by professing Christians - however dignified by the name of the Goddess of Liberty, whose footstool is the crushed necks of the groaning millions, and who rejoices in the resoundings of the tyrant's lash, and the cries of his tortured victims.

  Thaddeus Stevens

  Christian, Names, Tyrants

  "Shapers of the Great Debate on the Civil War: A Biographical Dictionary". Book by Dan Monroe and Bruce Tap, p. 255, 2005.

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• Man's inhumanity to man is not the last word. The truth lies deeper. It is economic slavery, the savage struggle for a crumb, that has converted mankind into wolves and sheep.

  Alexander Berkman

  Lying, Struggle, Men

  Alexander Berkman (1912). “Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist”

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• I have made some enemies. My enemies in the southern states consisted of those who oppressed the black slave. My enemies in the north are among those who would perpetuate the slavery of the wage workers

  Albert Parsons

  Southern, Black, Enemy

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• It is slavery to live in the mind unless it has become part of the body

  Khalil Gibran

  Mind, Body, Parts Of The Body

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• Progress without the reasoned freedom to think and act is regression to slavery.

  Richard John Neuhaus

  Thinking, Progress, Regression

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• The land on which they (the Founding Fathers) formed this Union was stolen. The hands with which they built this nation were enslaved. The women who birthed the citizens of the nation are second class. This is the imperfect fabric of our nation, at times we’ve torn and stained it, and at other moments, we mend and repair it. But it’s ours, all of it. The imperialism, the genocide, the slavery, also the liberation and the hope and the deeply American belief that our best days still lie ahead of us.

  Melissa Harris-Perry

  Lying, Father, Hands

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• American slavery was not a Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It was a holocaust. My ancestors are slaves. Stolen from Africa. I will honor them.

  Spike Lee

  Holocaust, Honor, Spaghetti

  Twitter post from Dec 22, 2012

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• Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

  Alexander H. Stephens

  Philosophical, Men, Race

  Cornerstone Speech, Delivered 21 March 1861, Savannah, Georgia

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• Since Christianity is in fact a slave religion, it is satirical at
  least to see the negro adopt a slave religion, after chattel slavery was
  ended. It simply underlines the fact that consciously or unconsciously, weak
  humans desire the status of sheep, no matter what they say.

  Tom Metzger

  Sheep, Desire, Matter

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• The Irishman frees himself from slavery when he realizes the truth that the capitalist system is the most foreign thing in Ireland. The Irish question is a social question. The whole age-long fight of the Irish people against their oppressors resolves itself in the last analysis into a fight for the mastery of the means of life, the sources of production, in Ireland. Who would own and control the land? The people, or the invaders; and if the invaders, which set of them - the most recent swarm of land thieves, or the sons of the thieves of a former generation?

  James Connolly

  Mean, Fighting, Son

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• When you consider that God could have commanded anything he wanted--anything!--the Ten [Commandments] have got to rank as one of the great missed moral opportunities of all time. How different history would have been had he clearly and unmistakably forbidden war, tyranny, taking over other people's countries, slavery, exploitation of workers, cruelty to children, wife-beating, stoning, treating women--or anyone--as chattel or inferior beings.

  Katha Pollitt

  God, Country, Children

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• Socialism is a new form of slavery.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Political, Politics, Socialism

  "Notes for a Speech on Socialism" by Alexis de Tocqueville, 1848.

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• In careless ignorance they think it civilization, when in reality it is a portion of their slavery...To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false pretenses, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

  Tacitus

  Ignorance, Reality, Thinking

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• And who is responsible for this appalling child slavery? Everyone.

  Mother Jones

  Children, Responsible

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