The mere holding of slaves, therefore, is a condition having per se nothing of moral character in it, any more than the being a parent, or employer, or ruler — Samuel Morse
Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal. — Charles Darwin
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
Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. — Herbert Marcuse
The moment a man claims a right to control the will of a fellow being by physical force, he is at heart a slaveholder. — Henry Clarke Wright
A man is no less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years. — Lysander Spooner
The virtue of female slaves is wholly at the mercy of irresponsible tyrants, and women are bought and sold in our slave markets, to gratify the brutal lust of those who bear the name of Christians. — Sarah Moore Grimke
A creditor is worse than a slave-owner; for the master owns only your person, but a creditor owns your dignity, and can command it. — Victor Hugo
There're two people in the world that are not likeable: a master and a slave. — Nikki Giovanni
By the Law of Slavery, man, created in the image of God, is divested of the human character, and declared to be a mere chattel. — Charles Sumner
In those days, slavery was not looked upon, even in Quaker Philadelphia, with the shudder and abhorrence one feels towards it now. — John Sergeant Wise
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds! — Marcus Garvey
Your mind is your instrument. Learn to be its master and not its slave.
Capitalism is a development by refinement from feudalism, just as feudalism is development by refinement from slavery . Capitalism is but the gentlemen's method of slavery. — Kwame Nkrumah
My mission is to lead the country out of a bad situation of corruption, depression and slavery. After I rid the country of these vices, I will then organize and supervise a general election of a genuinely democratic civilian government. — Idi Amin
The man who is not able to develop and use his mind is bound to be the slave of the other man who uses his mind — Marcus Garvey
Those who do not have goals are doomed forever to work for those who do.
America's greatest crime against the black man was not slavery or lynching, but that he was taught to wear a mask of self-hate and self-doubt. — Malcolm X
The greatest evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude but rather the narrative of racial differences we created to legitimate slavery. Because we never dealt with that evil, I don't think slavery ended in 1865, it just evolved. — Bryan Stevenson
What a bunch of garbage, liberal, Democratic, conservative, Republican, it's all there to control you, two sides of the same coin! Two management teams, bidding for control of the CEO job of Slavery Incorporated! — Alex Jones
You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know. — William Wilberforce
Slave Ships Quotes
It's time for Black people to stop playing the separating game of geography, of where the slave ship put us down. We must concentrate on where the slave ship picked us up. — John Henrik Clarke
I be off the slave ships, building pyramids, writing my own hieroglyphs — Kendrick Lamar
Nobody had ever instructed him that a slave-ship, with a procession of expectant sharks in its wake, is a missionary institution, by which closely-packed heathen are brought over to enjoy the light of the Gospel. — Harriet Beecher Stowe
Courage is refusing to be a slave to fear.
from the slave ship to the citizenship we faced a lot of bullship — Amiri Baraka
Sacrifice and neon lights, Slaveships don't wait, Love many, trust few, And don't be late... — Tom Morello
The Islamic community today is faced with a new version of an old struggle. My late mother used to say it doesn't matter whether you came to this country on the Mayflower or on a slave ship, through Ellis Island or the Rio Grande. We're all in the same boat now. — Carol Moseley Braun
We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.
And so, whether they came here on the Mayflower, on a slave ship, or on an airplane from Havana, we are all descendants of the men and women who built here the nation that saved the world. — Marco Rubio
America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known. — Pat Buchanan
His foreparents came to America in immigrant ships. My foreparents came to America in slave ships. But whatever the original ships, we are both in the same boat tonight. — Jesse Jackson
I won't slave for beggar's pay, likewise gold and jewels, but I would slave to learn the way, to sink your ship of fools. — Robert Hunter
White America has seen to it that Black history has been suppressed in schools and in American history books. The bravery of hundreds of our ancestors who took part in slave rebellions has been lost in the mists of time, since plantation owners did their best to prevent any written accounts of uprisings. — Huey Newton
Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners. — Vladimir Lenin
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
We live in an age of apologies. Apologies, fake or true, are expected from the descendants of empire builders, slave owners and persecutors of heretics, and from men who -in our eyes- just got it all wrong. So, with the age of 85 coming up shortly, I want to make an apology. It appears I must apologize for being male, white, and European. — Alec Guinness
It's the old American Double Standard, ya know: Say one thing, do somethin' different. And of course this country is founded on the double standard. That's our history. We were founded on a very basic double standard: This country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free. — George Carlin
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
But assuming the same premises, to wit, that all men are equal by the law of nature and of nations, the right of property in slaves falls to the ground; for one who is equal to another cannot be the owner or property of that other. — William H. Seward
It is a great mistake, as we have already remarked, to be afraid of Him and to act in His presence like a timid and craven slave trembling with fright before his master. — Alphonsus Liguori
When the passage "All men are born free and equal," when that passage was being written were not some of the signers legalised owners of slaves? — Herman Melville
The protection of the masses has in all times been the pretense of tyranny - the plea of monarchy, of aristocracy, of special privilege of every kind. The slave owners justified slavery as protecting the slaves. — Henry George
With the Lincoln assassination, the South didnt feel it could mourn along with the North. But Garfield was beloved by all the American people. He was trusted and respected by North and South, by freed slaves and former slave owners. Also by pioneers, which his parents had been, and by immigrants. — Candice Millard
Let not the 12 million Negroes be ashamed of the fact that they are the grandchildren of slaves. There is dishonor in being slave-owners. — Lil Wayne
Hundreds of thousands and millions of wage slaves of capital and peasants downtrodden by the serf-owners are going to the slaughter for the dynastic interests of a handful of crowned brigands, for the profits of the bourgeoisie in its drive to plunder foreign lands. — Vladimir Lenin
And I particularly like the whole thing of being boss. Boss and employee... It's the slave quality that I find very alluring. — Hugh Grant
As with cows, mares, female camels, slave girls, buffalo cows, she goats, and ewes, it is not the begetter ,or his owner who obtains the offspring, even thus ,it is with the wives of others. — Guru Nanak
There were 315,000 slave owners in the Union Army (with 200,000 in the Confederate Army) and the men who walked away from the Union Army were adamantly opposed to freeing slaves. We cite these facts and recorded statistics to point out that the principal cause of the war was not the issue of slavery. — John Coleman
When a slave begins to take pride in his fetters and hugs them like precious ornaments, the triumph of the slave-owner is complete. — Mahatma Gandhi
The worst slave owners were those who were kind to their slaves — Oscar Wilde
This country was founded by a group of slave owners who told us that all men are created equal. — George Carlin
Yes here's to the founding fathers - slave-owners, British citizens who didn't want to pay taxes. — David Mazzucchelli
The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads during the Civil War and justified it. — Dan Savage
Blacks have no rights - in fact they were three - fifths human according to the constitution to give slave owners more voting rights. So that's African Americans. — Noam Chomsky
Since we were renamed, and now it feels like 80 percent of the African-American population has the name Washington or Jefferson or some president or slave owner's name. And, I almost wonder is this, like, is this part of a way of taking back the principle of naming your - I might be going too far into this - but naming your kids something of your choice? — Jordan Peele
To relive the relationship between owner and slave we can consider how we treat our cars and dogs -- a dog exercising a somewhat similar leverage on our mercies and an automobile being comparable in value to a slave in those days. — Edward Hoagland
There was not a single Negro slave owner who did not know dozens of Negroes just as capable of learning and efficiency as the mass of poor white people around and about, and some quite as capable as the average slaveholder. They had continually, in the course of the history of slavery, recognized such men. — W. E. B. Du Bois
The state should never have instituted and enforced legal property rights in persons, and should not have been in the business of returning runaway slaves to their "rightful owners." The whole institution of property in human beings was an unjust social institution and should not have been maintained in existence. It is this sort of thought that I'm appealing to at the supranational level. — Thomas Pogge
Once the Fugitive Slave Act took effect, the Northern states were no longer safe for those who managed to escape from being enslaved. The second season of Underground does explore Canada's role in providing a welcoming place for the thousands who were in danger of being captured and returned to their owners, and those who escaped by way of rerouting beyond the American borders. — Aisha Hinds
If your book is set in the plantation days of the slave-owning South and you write a little romance between two slave owners without acknowledging the system they live, that's a political gesture. — Mohsin Hamid
Studies of the people named and described in earliest Christian texts show that, right from the earliest years, they included craftsmen, merchants, and owners of businesses. Of course, there were also slaves and poor among believers. By at least the second century, there were also believers from upper levels of Roman society. — Larry Hurtado
People have called Christopher Columbus horrible, racist, a psycho-maniac killer and a slave owner. — Rush Limbaugh
In the ideology of the new Silicon Valley, work was for the owned. Play was for the owners. There was a fundamental capitalism at work: While they abhorred the idea of being a wage slave, the young men of Silicon Valley were not trying to tear down the capitalist system. They were trying to become its new masters. — Katherine Losse
Their property held them in chains...chains which shackled their courage and choked their faith and hampered their judgment and throttled their soul...If they stored up their treasure in heaven, they would not now have an enemy and a thief within their own household...They think of themselves as owners, whereas it is they rather who are owned: enslaved as they are to their own property, they are not the masters of their money but its slaves. — Cyprian
My favorite quote is Thomas Jefferson`s "The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time." Well, he was a slave-owner. But these institutions, while they weren't perfect at the time, did allow people to prosper and to continue to struggle and build toward them. That's what you need, is good institutions and I think people will eventually live up to them. — Condoleezza Rice
Money, as it increases, becomes either the master or the slave of ts owner. — Horace
Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good. — Oscar Wilde
Private property in the instruments of production is an institutional device both for dispersing power and for securing effective organization of production. The only simple property system is that of a slave society with a single slave owner - which, significantly, is the limiting case of despotism and of monopoly. Departure from such a system is a fair measure of human progress. — Henry Calvert Simons
It wasn't so bad being a slave when your owner was yourself and stood up for you. — Orson Scott Card
When watching men of power in action it must be always kept in mind that, whether they know it or not, their main purpose is the elimination or neutralization of the independent individual- the independent voter, consumer, worker, owner, thinker- and that every device they employ aims at turning men into a manipulable animated instrument which is Aristotle's definition of a slave. — Eric Hoffer
The human beings at the helm of the new nation [USA], whatever their limitations [slave owners, anti-democracy], were truly revolutionary. The theory of liberty born in that era, the seed of the idea, was perfect.More important, the idea itself carried within it the moral power to correct the contradictions in its execution that were obvious from the very birth of the new nation. — Naomi Wolf
A slave's life is mostly composed of patience and study. Yes, study. If not with actual books, then following the example of greater, senior slaves. Or learning every nuance of their owner's character, so that they can more completely and seamlessly offer themselves at the right time and in the right manner. — Laura Antoniou
History has different yardsticks for the cruelty of the Northerners and the cruelty of the Southerners in the Civil War. A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality! — Leon Trotsky
I wished that I were the owner of every southern slave, that I might cast off the shackles from their limbs, and witness the rapture which would excite them in the first dance of their freedom. — Thaddeus Stevens
The South was at the point where the scale was tipping against slavery. It was slowly dawning on the plantation owners that slave labor was not economic, besides being morally wrong. Slavery was destined to be abolished, whether for economic reasons or moral reasons matters not, but the international intriguers were not going to wait for voluntary abolition to rob them of their trump card. — John Coleman
Some people are blinded by their experience. Soldiers know how important war is. Owners of slaves learn every day how inferior subject peoples are. — William Stafford
In this respect, granting homosexuals the right to marry is like granting plantation owners the right to own slaves. — Alan Keyes
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