Slavery Quotes - Page 33

• We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education. What we call our root-and-branch reforms of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only medicating the symptoms. We must begin higher up, namely, in education.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Education, War, Gambling

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1866). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations”, p.367

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• . . . what a burning shame it is that many of the pieces on the subject of slavery and the slave trade, contained in different school books, have been lost sight of, or been subject to the pruning knife of the slaveholding expurgatorial system!

  Robert Purvis

  Book, School, Sight

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• When white men were willing to put their own offspring in the kitchen and corn field and allowed them to be sold into bondage as slaves and degraded them as another man's slave, the retribution of wrath was hanging over this country and the South paid penance in four years of bloody war.

  Rebecca Latimer Felton

  Country, War, Men

  Rebecca Latimer Felton (1919). “Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth: Also Addresses Before Georgia Legislature Woman's Clubs, Women's Organizations and Other Noted Occasions”

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• It was a marvel, an enigma in abolition latitudes, that the slaves did not rise en-masse, at the beginning of hostilities.

  Rebecca Latimer Felton

  War, Rose, Enigma

  Rebecca Latimer Felton (1919). “Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth: Also Addresses Before Georgia Legislature Woman's Clubs, Women's Organizations and Other Noted Occasions”

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• Money originated with royalty and slavery, it has nothing to do with democracy or the struggle of the empoverished enslaved majority.

  Aristotle

  Struggle, Democracy, Majority

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• We black women must forgive black men for not protecting us against slavery, racism, white men, our confusion, their doubts. And black men must forgive black women for our own sometimes dubious choices, divided loyalties, and lack of belief in their possibilities. Only when our sons and our daughters know that forgiveness is real, existent, and that those who love them practice it, can they form bonds as men and women that really can save and change our community.

  Marita Golden

  Loyalty, Daughter, Real

  Marita Golden (2011). “Saving Our Sons”, p.185, Anchor

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• Shatter the icons of slavery and fear.
  Replace
  the leer
  of the minstrel's burnt-cork face
  with a proud, serene
  and classic bronze of Benin.

  Dudley Randall

  Icons, Proud, Faces

  Dudley Randall (2009). “Roses and Revolutions: The Selected Writings of Dudley Randall”, p.185, Wayne State University Press

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• I think that hip-hop should be spelled with a capital "H," and as one word. It's the name of our black people culture, and it's the name of our identity and consciousness. I think hip-hop is not a product, but a culture. I think rap is a product, but when hip-hop becomes a product, that's slavery, because you're talking about people's souls. To me, that's the biggest problem.

  KRS-One

  Rap, Thinking, Talking

  Interview with Nathan Rabin, www.avclub.com. April 25, 2001.

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• Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable.

  Toni Morrison

  War, Arrogance, Able

  Nobel Prize for Literature Lecture, delivered 7 December 1993

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• Whatever I had read as a child about the saints had thrilled me. I could see the nobility of giving one's life for the sick, the maimed, the leper. But there was another question in my mind. Why was so much done in remedying the evil instead of avoiding it in the first place? Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves, but to do away with slavery?

  Dorothy Day

  Children, Order, Evil

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• As the feudal system retained many of the elements of slavery, modified by the traditions, customs, and practices of the primitive communities, so capitalism retained the essential usurpations of feudalism, though professing to guard personal freedom, and to observe equity between the owner and the occupier of the land, the employer and the employed.

  Joshua K. Ingalls

  Land, Practice, Community

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• The fact that slavery is written into the Constitution is about as entrenched a form of classism as you could possibly imagine.

  Beau Willimon

  Facts, Constitution, Imagine

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• Without the institution of slavery, civilization would never have been achieved, for no one could ever have done anything intellectual if he had to spend all his time hewing and digging and fighting.

  Jeff Cooper

  Fighting, Civilization, Intellectual

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• [T]he only thing the United States government ever did about slavery was to abolish it. Perhaps that was a mistake, but I do not feel inclined to apologize for it.

  Jeff Cooper

  Mistake, Government, United States

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• Slavery, racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry, subordination, and human rights abuse transform and adapt with the times.

  John Prendergast

  Rights, Racism, Abuse

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• I sit here before you trying to figure out how to pay a tax debt? If that's not like enough to slavery, I don't know.

  Lauryn Hill

  Trying, Debt, Pay

  "The tax education of Lauryn Hill: Prison" By Alan Duke, www.cnn.com. May 7, 2013.

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• Some are "industrious," and appear to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief; to suchI have at present nothing to say. Those who would not know what to do with more leisure than they now enjoy, I might advise to work twice as hard as they do,--work till they pay for themselves, and get their free papers.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Paper, Might, Pay

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “Walden”, p.51, Xist Publishing

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• If there be any man who thinks the ruin of a race of men a small matter, compared with the last decoration and completions of hisown comfort,--who would not so much as part with his ice- cream, to save them from rapine and manacles, I think I must not hesitate to satisfy that man that also his cream and vanilla are safer and cheaper by placing the negro nation on a fair footing than by robbing them.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Thinking, Ice Cream

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2009). “The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.754, Modern Library

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• If any mention was made of homicide, madness, adultery, and intolerable tortures, we would let the church-bells ring louder, the church-organ swell its peal and drown the hideous sound. The sugar they raised was excellent: nobody tasted blood in it.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Church Bells, Blood, Sound

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald A. Bosco, Joel Myerson (2015). “Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.277, Harvard University Press

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• America is not civil, whilst Africa is barbarous.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  America

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1844). “An Address Delivered in the Court-house in Concord, Massachusetts, on 1st August, 1844: On the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies”, p.33

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• The subject is said to have the property of making dull men eloquent.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Dull, Said

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1233, Delphi Classics

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• It now appears that the negro race is, more than any other, susceptible of rapid civilization. The emancipation is observed, in the islands, to have wrought for the negro a benefit as sudden as when a thermometer is brought out of the shade into the sun. It has given him eyes and ears.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Eye, Islands, Race

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1844). “An Address Delivered in the Court-house in Concord, Massachusetts, on 1st August, 1844: On the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies”, p.30

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• Give the slave the least elevation of religious sentiment, and he is not slave: you are the slave: he not only in his humility feels his superiority, feels that much deplored condition of his to be a fading trifle, but he makes you feel it too. He is the master.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Religious, Humility, Giving

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1866). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations”, p.258

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• I can testify, from my own experience and observation, that slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks. It makes the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched. And as for the colored race, it needs an abler pen than mine to describe the extremity of their sufferings, the depth of their degradation.

  Harriet Ann Jacobs

  Daughter, Father, Son

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

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• The degradation, the wrongs, the vices, that grow out of slavery, are more than I can describe. They are greater than you would willingly believe.

  Harriet Ann Jacobs

  Believe, Vices, Degradation

  Harriet Ann Jacobs (1861). “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”, p.45

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