Slavery Quotes

William Wilberforce

You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.

Gary L. Francione

We do not need to eat animals, wear animals, or use animals for entertainment purposes, and our only defense of these uses is our pleasure, amusement, and convenience.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Thanks to his salary, an employee is free to eat whatever, wherever. However, because of his job, he is not free to eat whenever.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Work is a vehicle with which man chases some fleeting destination called a full tummy.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The employed are punished by having to do what they do not love. The self-employed are punished by the opposite.

Robert Black

Most of us spend all our working life dreaming of doing nothing, then when we end up doing nothing, we long for something. When we have neither longing, I think that is what they call living for the moment.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

12% of employees eat because they are hungry. 88% of employees eat because it is 1 o’clock.

George Gordon Byron

Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.

C.S. Lewis

And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history - money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery - the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

Horace Greeley

It is impossible to enslave, mentally or socially, a bible-reading people. The principles of the bible are the groundwork of human freedom.

Don Winslow

I’m sorry to pull you out of your classes, but your adviser understands,” Kitteredge said. “He’s a friend of the family.”

So that’s it, Neal thought. You bought me; you own me.

Ayn Rand

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade...

Abraham Lincoln

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

Gary L. Francione

If you are not vegan, please consider going vegan. It’s a matter of nonviolence. Being vegan is your statement that you reject violence to other sentient beings, to yourself, and to the environment, on which all sentient beings depend.

Gary L. Francione

Veganism is an act of nonviolent defiance. It is our statement that we reject the notion that animals are things and that we regard sentient nonhumans as moral persons with the fundamental moral right not to be treated as the property or resources of humans.

Gary L. Francione

Ethical veganism represents a commitment to nonviolence.

Gary L. Francione

To say that a being who is sentient has no interest in continuing to live is like saying that a being with eyes has no interest in continuing to see. Death - however “humane” - is a harm for humans and nonhumans alike.

Gary L. Francione

Any serious social, political, and economic change must include veganism.

Gary L. Francione

You cannot live a nonviolent life as long as you are consuming violence. Please consider going vegan.

Gary L. Francione

Speciesism is morally objectionable because, like racism, sexism, and heterosexism, it links personhood with an irrelevant criterion. Those who reject speciesism are committed to rejecting racism, sexism, heterosexism, and other forms of discrimination as well.

Gary L. Francione

We should never present flesh as somehow morally distinguishable from dairy. To the extent it is morally wrong to eat flesh, it is as morally wrong - and possibly more morally wrong - to consume dairy

Anastasia

I refuse to believe all men are pigs and women competing whores.-ANASTASIA

Albert Camus

He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen - and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!

Philippe Claudel

...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.

Stefan Molyneux

Vengeance against predators is meals on wheels.

George Orwell

A plongeur is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of him.

Amit Kalantri

Earned money brings you security, borrowed money gets you slavery.

José P. Rizal

There are no tyrants if there are no slaves.

Justin K. McFarlane Beau

Any constituency that needs amending, is a prototype in error.

Bryant McGill

Most so-called success in the world is slavery.

Arthur Schopenhauer

That the Negroes were enslaved more than other races, and on a large scale, is evidently a result of their being, in contrast to other races, inferior in intelligence - which, however, does not justify such slavery

Friedrich Nietzsche

Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.

Jane Jensen

No one is more vulnerable to fear than a man who keeps another in bondage. He will do anything to prevent justice from rearing its head - for he knows well what he deserves at the hands of those he subjugates.

Frederick Douglass

Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free

Jeffrey Tucker

The instant that any government obtains a monetary printing press, it becomes a deeply dishonest government, empowered to rob people by stealth. A government with the power to print money knows no limits.

Alexis De Tocqueville

The free worker receives a wage; the slave an education, food, care, clothing; the money that the master spends to keep the slave is drained little by little and in detail; one hardly perceives it.1

Martin Luther King Jr.

Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.

Solomon Northup

...So we passed, handcuffed and in silence, through the streets of Washington, through the Captial of a nation, whose theory of government, we are told, rests on the foundation of man's inalienable right to life, LIBERTY, and the pursuit of happiness! Hail! Columbia, happy land, indeed!

Rodney Stark

Slavery ended in medieval Europe only because the church extended its sacraments to all slaves and then managed to impose a ban on the enslavement of Christians (and of Jews). Within the context of medieval Europe, that prohibition was effectively a rule of universal abolition.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A realist is a slave to reality.

Samuel Sewall

So that originally, and Naturally, there is no such thing as Slavery. Joseph was rightfully no more a Slave to his brethren, then they were to him: and they no more Authority to Sell him, than they had to Slay him. [Genesis 37].

Oscar Wilde

Im Krieg machen die Starken die Schwachen zu Sklaven, im Frieden machen die Reichen die Armen zu Sklaven.

Widad Akrawi

I will follow anyone...
And tell everyone...
How grateful I am...
To the Western nations.

Widad Akrawi

We are determined to answer evil with GOOD, slavery with FREEDOM, rape with hope!
We are against slavery, rape, beheading, torture, violations of human rights, corruption and misuse of religion!

Widad Akrawi

The use of rape and enslavement as weapons of war MUST END!

W.E.B. Du Bois

I refused to teach Sunday school. When Archdeacon Henry Phillips, my last rector, died, I flatly refused again to join any church or sign any church creed. From my 30th year on I have increasingly regarded the church as an institution which defended such evils as slavery, color caste, exploitation of labor and war.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

An artist that makes art merely to meet a demand is a slave to what his patrons wants to see, or, hear.

Amit Kalantri

Be the love of your love, not the slave of your love.

W.G. Sebald

The capital amassed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through various forms of slave economy is still in circulation, said De Jong, still bearing interest, increasing many times over and continually burgeoning anew.

David Brion Davis

<...> this Revolutionary ideology, epitomized by the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence, showed that the very idea of slavery is a fiction or fraud, since liberty and equality are fundamental rights that no one can legitimately lose.

David Brion Davis

<...> black slavery was basic and integral to the entire phenomenon we call “America.” This often hidden or disguised truth ultimately involves the profound contradiction of a free society that was made possible by black slave labor.

David Brion Davis

For Southerners, a white skin was the distinguishing badge of mind and intellect. Black skin was the sign that a given people had been providentially designed to serve as menial laborers, as what Hammond called the “mudsill” class necessary to support every society.

David Brion Davis

<...> tyranny is a central theme of American history, that racial exploitation and racial conflict have been part of the DNA of American culture.

David Brion Davis

The subject of British abolitionism has long been controversial, complex, and even baffling. It also raises the issue of moral progress in history - whether groups of reformers and even nations can succeed in eliminating deeply entrenched forms of human oppression, and if so, by what methods, misconceptions, and under what conditions?

David Brion Davis

Much as slavery in the United States was part of a larger Atlantic Slave System, so America’s War of Independence was an outgrowth of Europe’s Seven Years’ War - from 1756 to 1763 - and also a precursor or harbinger of the French and Haitian revolutions and of the subsequent Latin American wars for independence from Spain.

David Brion Davis

Thus the word "inhuman", in this book's title, refers to the unconscionable and unsuccessful goal of bestializing (in the form of pets as well as beasts of burden) a class of human beings.

David Brion Davis

It is of inestimable importance that the classical and biblical traditions linked slavery with original sin, punishment <...>, the later abolition of slavery became tied with personal and collective freedom, with the redemption from sin, with the romanticizing of many form of labor, and with the ultimate salvation of humankind.

Bonnie Greer

The official erasure of any existence before enslavement – as if black Americans did not exist before the yolk and the chains and whip – has always created a passion for us.

Black people need to find out. We have to find out Who We Are and Where We Come From.

Walter Rodney

There was a period when the capitalist system increased the well-being of significant numbers of people as a by-product of seeking out profits for a few, but today the quests for profits comes into sharp conflict with people’s demands that their material and social needs should be fulfilled. Pg. 10

Christine De Pizan

How many women are there ... who because of their husbands' harshness spend their weary lives in the bond of marriage in greater suffering than if they were slaves among the Saracens?

Margarita Engle

Marriage without love is just one more twisted form of slavery.

Paula Fox

You'll see some bad things, but if you didn't see them, they'd still be happening.

Gary L. Francione

All sentient beings should have at least one right - the right not to be treated as property

Tim Wise

Genealogy itself is something of a privilege, coming far more easily to those of us for whom enslavement, conquest, and dispossession of our land has not been our lot.

Aberjhani

The story of the American Civil War is essentially one of human beings––Northerners, Southerners, Blacks, Whites, men, women–– holding themselves accountable for the future of a nation.

M. Osman Baalbaki

The difference between a free human and a human is not the word "free" it's the word "human" , because humanity can never be caged with the chains of slavery.

Miguel Syjuco

The slaves of today will become the tyrants of tomorrow-the proletariat overthrows the hegemon to become the hegemon itself, only to be eventually overthrown by a proto-hegemon that will in turn lose its position. It is this dizzying cycle that keeps humanity chasing the tail it lost millennia ago

Nancy Rawles

Your mama coming back. Just cause you cant sees a person aint mean nothing. They still there. You worry you never gonna find your mama but she gonna come to you. Close your eyes. I bets you see her good.

Nenia Campbell

Subjugation requires vigilance; if you relax your brutality even for a moment, the people you're oppressing will revolt at the first sign of weakness. That's why dictatorial regimes are always a slippery slope of cruelty doomed to end in failure.

Abraham Lincoln

Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves

Patrick Henry

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

Toni Morrison

To be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.

Frederick Douglass

Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us.

Mark Mirabello

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.

Wilhelm Reich

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

Harriet Jacobs

There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment

Ralph Ellison

Words of Emancipation didn't arrive until the middle of June so they called it Juneteenth. So that was it, the night of Juneteenth celebration, his mind went on. The celebration of a gaudy illusion.

Larken Rose

Politics: the art of using euphemisms, lies, emotionalism and fear-mongering to dupe average people into accepting-or even demanding-their own enslavement.

Frederick Douglass

I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.

Lucretia Mott

Liberty is no less a blessing because oppression has so long darkened the mind that it can not appreciate it.

Alexis De Tocqueville

It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for human cattle.

George Santayana

The man who is not permitted to own is owned.

Robert Peate

They support freedom for themselves and slavery for everyone else, and they use the freedom of the market to disguise this fact. Economic coercion is just a different form of force, which they couple with the fraud of calling it freedom. I was like them, but I will never be like them again.

Pierce Brown

Slaves do not have the bravery of free men.

Patricia Briggs

The hardest memory of slavery that Rialla had to bear was not the lack of freedom; it was the lack of desiring freedom.

Joaquim Nabuco

Educate your children, educate yourself, in the love for the freedom of others, for only in this way will your own freedom not be a gratuitous gift from fate. You will be aware of its worth and will have the courage to defend it.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

And oft the blessed time foretells
When all men shall be free;
And musical, as silver bells,
Their falling chains shall be.

Aisha Mirza

Slavery remains rife, the shackles are just different. Labels and desires have replaced the cuffs and chains.

Julius Ceasar

Human nature is universally imbued with a desire for liberty, and a hatred for servitude.

Marquita Burke-DeJesus

Illusions of freedom will never satisfy me.

Kenneth Patchen

Out of slavery, freedom -yes, & roses from the pig's behind.

Bryant McGill

America has a unique type of slavery that looks like freedom.

Eric Micha'el Leventhal

As a rule,
I believe people shouldn't follow rules;
rules should follow people.

L.M. Montgomery

Oh, as Dean says, nobody is free - never, except just for a few brief moments now and then, when the flash comes, or when as on my haystack night, the soul slips over into eternity for a little space. All the rest of our years we are slaves to something - traditions - conventions - ambitions - relations.

Euripides

Again, where the people are absolute rulers of the land, they rejoice in having the openness and exuberance of youth, while a tyrant counts this a danger, and seeks to slay or silence those possessed of spirit, while the discreet fear his power and violence.

Terry Pratchett

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

Nenia Campbell

You may have bought my body, you may even have the papers to prove it, but don't fool yourself into thinking for a moment that my heart and mind were included in the purchase.

Rousas John Rushdoony

Slaves are governed by the fear of man, and, whenever the fear of man replaces the fear of God in a society, slavery reappears and increases.

Mary E. DeMuth

We enslave in the manner we talk to ourselves. But the truth is, God already set us free. He secured our release. To constantly hurt ourselves, resting in our inadequacy, is to call Him a LIAR.

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