Slavery Quotes
On bondage, freedom, and an unfinished history.
These lines address slavery mainly through history: a hope for compromise before change occurred, ongoing modern efforts to identify and stop forced labor, and reflections on how one person's freedom has often depended on someone else's bondage. See History quotes for related context.
For months it seemed that a revolution was certain. But instead, slavery seems more likely now. The working class no longer has the physical resistance for a revolution, and the Entente is too strong, and Russia is too weak.
For the better part of two centuries, outsiders have been offering explanations that range from racist to learned-sounding - the supposed inferiority of blacks, the heritage of slavery, overpopulation - for why Haiti remains the poorest country in the Western...
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I think that slavery is wrong, morally, socially and politically. I desire that it should be no further spread in these United States, and I should not object if it should gradually terminate in the whole Union.
Emotion Quotes
Among the friends of Union, there is great diversity of sentiment and of policy in regard to slavery and the African race among us.
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save...
Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
I hope some compromise will be entered into between the two parties, slavery & antislavery, which will have the effect of allaying violent passions on both sides.
In the nineteenth century, slavery was the greatest wrong, and government never stood so tall as when it was redressing that wrong.
History Quotes
I would have the Constitution torn in shreds and scattered to the four winds of heaven. Let us destroy the Constitution and build on its ruins the temple of liberty. I have brothers in slavery. I have seen chains placed...
It appears that the present-day form of African American English is not the inheritance of the period of slavery, but the creation of the second half of the 20th century.
I speak on due consideration because Britain, France, and Mexico, have abolished slavery, and all other European states are preparing to abolish it as speedily as they can.
If slavery, limited as it yet is, now threatens to subvert the Constitution, how can we as wise and prudent statesmen, enlarge its boundaries and increase its influence, and thus increase already impending dangers?
It is the maintenance of slavery by law in a state, not parallels of latitude, that makes its a southern state; and the absence of this, that makes it a northern state.
Injustice Quotes
Sir, there is no Christian nation, thus free to choose as we are, which would establish slavery.
There is not only no free state which would now establish it, but there is no slave state, which, if it had had the free alternative as we now have, would have founded slavery.
To reduce this claim of slavery to an absurdity, it is only necessary to add that there are only two states in which slaves are a majority, and not one in which the slaveholders are not a very disproportionate minority.
Slavery, our country's original sin, sat on a foundation codified by laws enforced by police, by slave-catchers.
Oppression Quotes
One of the most effective tools in Brazil's efforts to eradicate slavery is a register compiled by the government that lists individuals and businesses found using slave labor. Those on the 'dirty list,' as the register is known, are fined...
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How can these Slavery quotes be used?
The tone throughout stays serious rather than celebratory, treating the subject as an unresolved thread in human history. Related: Injustice and Oppression quotes.
