Slavery Quotes - Page 16

• 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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• I have ever been opposed to banks, - opposed to internal improvements by the general government, - opposed to distribution of public lands among the states, - opposed to taking the power from the hands of the people, - opposed to special monopolies, - opposed to a protective tariff, - opposed to a latitudinal construction of the constitution, - opposed to slavery agitation and disunion. This is my democracy. Point to a single act of my public career not in keeping with these principles.

  Sam Houston

  Hands, Land, Careers

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• Nor is the guilt entirely with the warmongers, plutocrats and demagogues. If people permit exploitation and regimentation in any name, they deserve their slavery. A tyrant does not make his tyranny possible. It is made by the people and not otherwise.

  Jack Parsons

  Names, Tyrants, People

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• Therefore, the Negro nation are, as a rule, submissive to slavery, because [Negroes] have little [that is essentially] human and have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals, as we have stated.

  Ibn Khaldun

  Animal, Dumb, Littles

  "Muqaddimah" translated by Franz Rosenthal, Princeton University Press, 1981.

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• America is the promised land, because each generation bequeathed to its children a promise, a promise that they might not come to enjoy but which they fully expected their offspring to fulfill. So the words 'all men are created equal' took a life of its own, ultimately destined to end slavery and enfranchise women. And the words 'equal protection' and 'due process' inevitably led to the end of the words 'separate but equal,' ensuring that the walls of segregation would crumble, whether at the lunch counter or at the voting booth.

  Joe Biden

  Children, Wall, Men

  Joe Biden (2007). “Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics”, p.192, Random House

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• The Conservative knows that to regard man as part of an undifferentiated mass is to consign him to ultimate slavery.

  Barry Goldwater

  Men, Conservative, Mass

  Barry Goldwater (2010). “The Conscience of a Conservative”, p.11, Bottom of the Hill

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• I believe this Government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Believe, Patriotic, Government

  Speech at Republican state convention nominating him to run for U.S. senator, Springfield, Ill., 16 June 1858

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• The American Negro must rebuild his past in order to make his future. Though it is orthodox to think of America as the one country where it is unnecessary to have a past, what is a luxury for the nation as a whole becomes a prime social necessity for the Negro. For him, a group tradition must supply compensation for persecution, and pride of race the antidote for prejudice. History must restore what slavery took away, for it is the social damage of slavery that the present generation must repair and offset.

  Arturo Alfonso Schomburg

  Country, Pride, Past

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• I think a commission set up to examine slavery and the consequences of it, would probably be a very fruitful, important dialogue for the United States to be involved in.

  Bob Matsui

  Thinking, Important, United States

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• To be ignorant and to be deceived are two different things. To be ignorant is to be a slave of the world. To be deceived is to be the slave of another man. The question will always be: Why, when all men are ignorant, and therefore already slaves, does this latter slavery sting us so?

  R. Scott Bakker

  Men, Two, Ignorant

  R. Scott Bakker (2008). “The Darkness that Comes Before: The Prince of Nothing, Book One (The Prince of Nothing)”, p.80, The Overlook Press

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• More is spent in a single month [in the U.S.] fighting the war on drugs than all monies ever expended domestically or internationally fighting slavery from its inception. Per month, we spend more on the drug war than we ever have trying to free slaves.

  Mira Sorvino

  War, Fighting, Drug

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• No, this is not what a fair God would do. And why does it not say anywhere in the Bible that slavery is wrong? It only says that you should treat your slaves well. Well, I don't care if you treat them well. How is it possible that it is not immoral to own another person? Why isn't that one of the Ten Commandments? 'Thou shalt not own another person.' You want to sit here and tell me that fornication is worse than owning someone?

  Mira Sorvino

  Want, Doe, Care

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