Slavery Quotes

In the old Republican days the subject of slavery and of the saving of the Union made appeals to the consciences and liberty-loving instincts of the people. These later years have been full of talk about commerce and dinner pails, but I feel sure that the American conscience and the American love of liberty have not been smothered. They will break through this crust of sordidness and realize that those only keep their liberties who accord liberty to others. ~ Benjamin Harrison

The first thing you must realise is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: "Freedom is Slavery." Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone - free - the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. ~ George Orwell

Whoever says State necessarily says domination, and, consequently, slavery; a State without slavery, open or concealed, is inconceivable: that is why we are enemies of the State. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

It is in my mind that a people faced with death or slavery as their only choices are not readily going to relinquish war. - Longinus Sdapeze ~ Manda Scott

I shall oppose all slavery extension and all increase of slave representation in all places, at all times, under all circumstances, even against all inducements, against all supposed limitations of great interests, against all combinations, against all compromises. ~ Daniel Webster

Most Americans - professing Christians - for a fairly long time thought that slavery was simply "where people are these days." Is it really loving to set aside the truth about sin and judgment and even to downplay the person and work of Christ as its answer simply because these are not the questions that are being asked by unbelievers? Imagine our elementary school teachers deciding that they will no longer teach the alphabet because the children aren't interested in learning it. ~ Michael S. Horton

A half century from now, our grandchildren are likely to look back at the era of mass employment in the market with the same sense of utter disbelief as we look upon slavery and serfdom in former times. The very idea that a human being's worth was measured almost exclusively by his or her productive output of goods and services and material wealth will seem primitive, even barbaric, and be regarded as a terrible loss of human value to our progeny living in a highly automated world where much of life is lived on the Collaborative Commons. ~ Jeremy Rifkin

Slavery and the Bible? First Corinthians 7:21 told slaves to take the opportunity to be free. Let me put forth that God commanded the abolition of slavery. ~ Gina Turner

My people had used music to soothe slavery's torment or to propitiate God, or to describe the sweetness of love and the distress of lovelessness, but I knew no race could sing and dance its way to freedom. ~ Maya Angelou

Weekends are an employee's parole. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Perhaps the mildest form of the system of slavery is to be seen in the State of Kentucky. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe

Abolitionists believe that, as all men are born free, so all who are now held as slaves in this country were born free, and that they are slaves now is the sin, not of those who introduced the race into this country, but of those, and those alone, who now hold them and have held them in slavery from their birth. ~ Elijah Parish Lovejoy

In order to awaken, first of all one must realize that one is in a state of sleep. And in order to realize that one is indeed in a state of sleep, one must recognize and fully understand the nature of the forces which operate to keep one in the state of sleep, or hypnosis. It is absurd to think that this can be done by seeking information from the very source which induces the hypnosis.
... One thing alone is certain, that man's slavery grows and increases. Man is becoming a willing slave. He no longer needs chains. He begins to grow fond of his slavery, to be proud of it. And this is the most terrible thing that can happen to a man. ~ G.I. Gurdjieff

O neglectful Nature, wherefore art thou thus partial, becoming to some of thy children a tender and benignant mother, to others a most cruel and ruthless stepmother? I see thy children given into slavery to others without ever receiving any benefit, and in lieu of any reward for the services they have done for them they are repaid by the severest punishments. ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

That, I decided, was what it meant to be a slave: your past didn't matter, in the present you were invisible and you had no claim on the future. ~ Lawrence Hill

The most fundamental message of Gautama the Buddha is not God, is not soul ... it is freedom: freedom absolute, total, unconditional. He does not want to give you an ideology, because every ideology creates its own slavery. ~ Rajneesh

There's racism and sexism and ageism and all sorts of idiocies. But bad news is not news. We've had bad news as a species for a long time. We've had slavery and human sacrifice and the holocaust and brutalities of such measure. ~ Maya Angelou

Rand Paul ... said national health insurance is slavery. He said, I'm a physician, and if there's national health insurance, the government is forcing me to take care of somebody who is ill. Why should I be a slave to the state? Here we're getting capitalist pathology in its most extreme, lunatic form. It is the opposite of solidarity, mutual support, mutual help. ~ Noam Chomsky

The choice people have to make is never between slavery and freedom. We will always have to choose between slavery and the unknown. ~ Rachel Naomi Remen

The American idea of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American idea of masculinity. Idea may not be the precise word, for the idea of one's sexuality can only with great violence be divorced or distanced from the idea of the self. Yet something resembling this rupture has certainly occurred (and is occurring) in American life, and violence has been the American daily bread since we have heard of America. This violence, furthermore, is not merely literal and actual but appears to be admired and lusted after, and the key to the American imagination.

All countries or groups make of their trials a legend or, as in the case of Europe, a dubious romance called 'history.' But no other country has ever made so successful and glamorous a romance out of genocide and slavery; therefore, perhaps, the word I am searching for is not idea, but ideal.

The American IDEAL, then, of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American IDEAL of masculinity. This ideal has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and f****t, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that is is virtually forbidden - as an unpatriotic act - that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood. ~ James Baldwin

Ah, my dear friend, cheer up... After all, we have peace! And because there is peace, the occupiers can't behave so abominably anymore. All right, we're not free. But we are used to that, Mr. Kujawski. After all we were both born into slavery, and we will die in it. Oh yes, at first they'll exploit us ruthlessly. Fourteen hours of slave labor a day. A bowl of watery soup. Whippings, beatings... But that will pass with time. Because there is peace, they won't have a chance to get any new slaves. They'll have to take good care of those have already. Cheer up, dear Mr. Kujawski... [...] Arbeit macht frei, work makes man free, and it makes him especially so in the sunshine of European peace. We will lack only one thing. Only one! The right of dissent. The right to say out loud that we want a free and independent Poland, that we want to brush our teeth and go on holiday in our own way, conceive children and work our own way, think in our own way, live and die. This is the one thing you will find missing in the sunshine of European peace, which you, my friend, hold to be the highest good. ~ Andrzej Szczypiorski

Long live the liberation of the workers off all countries from the infernal chasm of war, exploitation and slavery! ~ Karl Liebknecht

The difference between freedom and slavery is one thin line ~ Banksy

One night of slavery is too much. ~ Darren Shan

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

You are not keeping slaves in your household.' 'I can't imagine why,' said Damen. 'If you've forgotten what to do with a slave, I can tell you,' said Laurent. 'You hate the idea of slavery. It turns your stomach.' Damen said it, a flat statement of truth. 'If I'd been anyone else, you would have freed me on the first night.' He searched Laurent's face. 'When I argued the case for slavery in Arles you didn't try to change my mind.' 'It is not a subject for an exchange of ideas. There is nothing to say.' 'There will be slaves in Akielos. We are a slave culture.' 'I know that.' Damen ~ C.S. Pacat

Jamaica was the Ophir of the West of Scotland in those times. Upon its sugar fields and by the agency of its slave labour, Glasgow slowly emerged from its primeval state of small borough town, to be a business centre, rivalling and soon surpassing Bristol in its West India trade. ~ R.B. Cunninghame Graham

Maybe the same instruments and tools that have been used to keep people in slavery and ignorance could potentially be used to liberate and awaken them. ~ Daniel Pinchbeck

Liberalism and their ideas have done more to kill black folks whom they claim so much to love than the Ku Klux Klan, lynching and slavery and Jim Crow ever did, now that's a fact. ~ E.W. Jackson

The last few centuries have seen the world freed from several scourges-slavery, for example; death by torture for heretics; and, most recently, smallpox. I am optimistic enough to believe that the next scourge to disappear will be large-scale warfare-killed by the existence and nonuse of nuclear weapons. ~ Luis Walter Alvarez

I think that if anything can be proved by natural theology, it is that slavery is morally wrong. God gave man a mouth to receive bread, hands to feed it, and his hand has a right to carry bread to his mouth without controversy. ~ Abraham Lincoln

As black people, we want our story to be this constant ascendance from slavery. But it's not like that. You push and it goes up. Then there's a backlash, and if folks stop pushing, it goes down. Let's face it, it's a lot more complicated. ~ Stanley Nelson Jr.

We're nothing but human.
The way of life can be free and beautiful.
But we have lost the way.
Greed has poisoned men's souls – has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.
We think too much and feel too little.
More than machinery we need humanity.
More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness.
Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.
Don't fight for slavery, fight for liberty.
You are not machines.
You are not cattle.
You have the love of humanity in your hearts.
In this world there is room for everyone and the earth is rich and can provide for everyone.
We all want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery.
We don't want to hate and despise one another.
We all want to help one another, human beings are like that.
You the people have the power.. the power to create machines.. the power to create happiness.
You the people have the power to make life free and beautiful..
To make this life a wonderful adventure.
We are all faced throughout our lives with agonizing decisions, moral choices.
Some are on a grand scale.. Most of these choices are on lesser points.
But we define ourselves by the choices we have made.
We are, in fact, the sum total of our choices.
Events unfold so unpredictably, so unfairly.
Human happiness does not seem to have been included in the design ~ Anonymous

Where there is no understanding there is hostility.
Where there is no brotherhood there is enmity.
Where there is no war there is serenity.
Where there is no abundance there is scarcity.
Where there is no shortage there is sufficiency.
Where there is no wealth there is poverty.
Where there is no greed there is humanity.
Where there is no falsehood there is integrity.
Where there is no prejudice there is diversity.
Where there is no tolerance there is bigotry.
Where there is no injustice there is equality.
Where there is no law there is disharmony.
Where there is no freedom there is slavery.
Where there is no order there is disharmony.
Where there is no government there is anarchy.
Where there is no republic there is tyranny. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

It seems almost incredible that the advocates of liberty should conceive of the idea of selling a fellow creature to slavery. ~ James Forten

You can't forgive your captor and simultaneously be upset at your place in society. ~ Darnell Lamont Walker

American feminism must become less parochial, so that it is every bit as concerned with sex slavery in Asia as with Title IX sports programs in Illinois. ~ Nicholas D. Kristof

We can believe in hierarchy. We can believe the universe was made just for us. Hierarchy and a major sense of entitlement are not insurmountable problems. The problem occurs when we treat those whom we believe lie beneath us as slaves. Religion once sustained human slavery. It was wrong then. When it blindly sanctions the slavery of every nonhuman animal, it is wrong now. ~ Cass R. Sunstein

If we want to understand the actions of a man in the early 1860's, put yourself back there in his shoes. As a young man he began piloting steamboats on the Mississippi, a job he loved and wanted to do the rest of his life, he said. The Civil War ended traffic on the River and his job. He wrote about it in A History of A Campaign That Failed. He said: "I joined the Confederacy, served for two weeks, deserted, and the Confederacy fell." His attachment to the Southern ideal of slavery does not appear very sturdy. ~ Hal Holbrook

To be white in the Caribbean is to have money, power, and the freedom to do anything or nothing - it is, in many cases, to occupy the top rung of society. ~ Sharon Hurley Hall

No blessing, no good, can follow in the path trodden by slavery. ~ Dorothea Dix

The portraits, of more historical than artistic interest, had gone; and tapestry, full of the blue and bronze of peacocks, fell over the doors, and shut out all history and activity untouched with beauty and peace; and now when I looked at my Crevelli and pondered on the rose in the hand of the Virgin, wherein the form was so delicate and precise that it seemed more like a thought than a flower, or at the grey dawn and rapturous faces of my Francesca, I knew all a Christian's ecstasy without his slavery to rule and custom; when I pondered over the antique bronze gods and goddesses, which I had mortgaged my house to buy, I had all a pagan's delight in various beauty and without his terror at sleepless destiny and his labour with many sacrifices; and I had only to go to my bookshelf, where every book was bound in leather, stamped with intricate ornament, and of a carefully chosen colour: Shakespeare in the orange of the glory of the world, Dante in the dull red of his anger, Milton in the blue grey of his formal calm; and I could experience what I would of human passions without their bitterness and without satiety. I had gathered about me all gods because I believed in none, and experienced every pleasure because I gave myself to none, but held myself apart, individual, indissoluble, a mirror of polished steel: I looked in the triumph of this imagination at the birds of Hera, glowing in the firelight as though they were wrought of jewels; and to my mind, for which symbolism wa ~ W.B. Yeats

As Margaret would later write, Europe had come to seem "my America," an unsettled territory where liberty was at hand, while the New World she had left behind had grown "stupid with the lust of gain, soiled by crime in its willing perpetuation of slavery, shamed by an unjust war," the imperialist conflict with Mexico over the annexation of Texas. ~ Megan Marshall

It is in refusing to recognize that we worship something that we move from the worship of that thing to slavery to that thing. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

All our wisdom consists in servile prejudices. All our practices are only subjection, impediment, and constraint. Civil man is born, lives, and dies in slavery. At his birth he is sewed in swaddling clothes; at his death he is nailed in a coffin. So long as he keeps his human shape, he is enchained by our institutions. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Metaphysical rebellion is the movement by which man protests against his condition and against the
whole of creation. It is metaphysical because it contests the ends of man and of creation. The slave
protests against the condition in which he finds himself within his state of slavery; the metaphysical rebel
protests against the condition in which he finds himself as a man. The rebel slave affirms that there is
something in him that will not tolerate the manner in which his master treats him; the metaphysical rebel
declares that he is frustrated by the universe. For both of them, it is not only a question of pure and simple
negation. In both cases, in fact, we find a value judgment in the name of which the rebel refuses to
approve the condition in which he finds himself. ~ Albert Camus

As far back as slavery, white people established a social hierarchy based on race and sex that ranked white men first, white women second, though sometimes equal to black men, who are ranked third, and black women last. What this means in terms of the sexual politics of rape is that if one white woman is raped by a black man, it is seen as more important, more significant than if thousands of black women are raped by one white man. Most Americans, and that includes black people, acknowledge and accept this hierarchy; they have internalized it either consciously or unconsciously. And for this reason, all through American history, black male rape of white women has attracted much more attention and is seen as much more significant than rape of black women by either white or black men. ~ Bell Hooks

There is a lot of pressure on women to
conform to a certain image – shadeism itself is another manifestation of that. ~ Sharon Hurley Hall

The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other. ~ Karl Marx

As the years passed, new myths arose to explain the mysterious objects the strangers brought from the land of the dead. A nineteenth-century missionary recorded, for example, an African explanation of what happened when captains descended into the holds of their ships to fetch trading goods like cloth. The Africans believed that these goods came not from the ship itself but from a hole that led into the ocean. Sea sprites weave this cloth in an "oceanic factory, and, whenever we need cloth, the captain ... goes to this hole and rings a bell." The sea sprites hand him up their cloth, and the captain "then throws in, as payment, a few dead bodies of black people he has bought from those bad native traders who have bewitched their people and sold them to the white men." The myth was not so far from reality. For what was slavery in the American South, after all, but a system for transforming the labor of black bodies, via cotton plantations, into cloth? ~ Adam Hochschild

All men know that by sheer weight of physical force, the mass of men must in the last resort become the arbiters of human action. But reason, skill, wealth, machines and power may for long periods enable the few to control the many. But to what end? The current theory of democracy is that dictatorship is a stopgap pending the work of universal education, equitable income, and strong character. But always the temptation is to use the stopgap for narrower ends, because intelligence, thrift and goodness seem so impossibly distant for most men. We rule by junta; we turn Fascist, because we do not believe in men; yet the basis of fact in this disbelief is incredibly narrow. We know perfectly well that most human beings have never had a decent human chance to be full men. Most of us may be convinced that even with opportunity the number of utter human failures would be vast; and yet remember that this assumption kept the ancestors of present white America long in slavery and degradation.

It is then one's moral duty to see that every human being, to the extent of his capacity, escapes ignorance, poverty and crime. With this high ideal held unswervingly in view, monarchy, oligarchy, dictatorships may rule; but the end will be the rule of All, if mayhap All or Most qualify. The only unforgivable sin is dictatorship for the benefit of Fools, Voluptuaries, gilded Satraps, Prostitutes and Idiots. The rule of the famished, unlettered, stinking mob is better than this and the on ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

How prudently most men creep into nameless graves, while now and then one or two forget themselves into immortality. ~ Wendell Phillips

Unfortunately, what is thrown away is not only food and dispensable objects, but often human beings themselves, who are discarded as 'unnecessary.' For example, it is frightful even to think there are children, victims of abortion, who will never see the light of day; children being used as soldiers, abused and killed in armed conflicts; and children being bought and sold in that terrible form of modern slavery which is human trafficking, which is a crime against humanity. ~ Pope Francis

You get what you want and you become its slave. ~ Ljupka Cvetanova

It seems to me that the term 'free will' is one of the most manipulated and exploited terms. The real explanation of free will is not that you have free will but that your will can eventually make you free, that will can liberate you, that will can release you from slavery. ~ Torkom Saraydarian

Feudalism, serfdom, slavery, all tyrannical institutions, are merely the most vigorous kind to rule, springing out of, and necessarily to, a bad state of man. The progress from these is the same in all cases - less government. ~ Herbert Spencer

If any religion allows the persecution of the people of different faiths, if any religion keeps women in slavery, if any religion keeps people in ignorance, then I can't accept that religion. ~ Taslima Nasrin

Your late purchase of an estate in the colony of Cayenne, with a view to emancipating the slaves on it, is a generous and noble proof of your humanity. Would to God a like spirit would diffuse itself generally into the minds of the people of this country; but I despair of seeing it. ~ George Washington

Fortunate, most fortunate occurrence! - fortunate for the millions of his manacled brethren, yet panting for deliverance from their awful thralldom! - fortunate for the cause of negro emancipation, and of universal liberty! - fortunate for the land of his birth, which he has already done so much to save and bless! - fortunate for a large circle of friends and acquaintances, whose sympathy and affection he has strongly secured by the many sufferings he has endured, by his virtuous traits of character, by his ever-abiding remembrance of those who are in bonds, as being bound with them! - fortunate for the multitudes, in various parts of our republic, whose minds he has enlightened on the subject of slavery, and who have been melted to tears by his pathos, or roused to virtuous indignation by his stirring eloquence against the enslavers of men! - fortunate for himself, as it at once brought him into the field of public usefulness, "gave the world assurance of a MAN," quickened the slumbering energies of his soul, and consecrated him to the great work of breaking the rod of the oppressor, and letting the oppressed go free! ~ William Lloyd Garrison

Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt. ~ Ezra Pound

Politicians argue for abortion largely because they do not want to spend the necessary money to feed, clothe and educate more people ... There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of higher order than the right to life. I do not share that view ... That was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private and therefore outside of your right to concerned. ~ Jesse Jackson

And that heart which was a wild garden was given to him who only loved trim lawns. And the imbecile carried the princess into slavery. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

If you want to be fully convinced of the abominations of slavery, go on a southern plantation, and call yourself a negro trader. Then there will be no concealment; and you will see and hear things that will seem to you impossible among human beings with immortal souls. ~ Harriet Ann Jacobs

Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. ~ Frederick Douglass

The first black borough presidents of Manhattan were West Indians. As late as 1970, the highest ranking blacks in New York's police department were West Indians, as were all the black federal judges in the city. The 1970 census showed that black West Indian families in the New York metropolitan area had 28 percent higher incomes than the families of American blacks. The incomes of second-generation West Indian families living in the same area exceeded that of black families by 58 percent. Neither race nor racism can explain such differences. Nor can slavery, since native-born blacks and West Indian blacks both had a history of slavery. ~ Thomas Sowell

My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute! ~ Frederick Douglass

But American statesmen have studied the constitutions of other states more than that of their own, and have succeeded in obscuring the American system in the minds of the people, and giving them in its place pure and simple democracy, which is its false development or corruption. Under the influence of this false development, the people were fast losing sight of the political truth that, though the people are sovereign, it is the organic, not the inorganic people, the territorial people, not the people as simple population, and were beginning to assert the absolute God-given right of the majority to govern. All the changes made in the bosom of the States themselves have consisted in removing all obstacles to the irresponsible will of the majority, leaving minorities and individuals at their mercy. This tendency to a centralized democracy had more to do with provoking secession and rebellion than the anti-slavery sentiments of the Northern, Central, and Western States. ~ Orestes Augustus Brownson

The hour is fast approaching, on which the Honor and Success of this army, and the safety of our bleeding Country depend. Remember officers and Soldiers, that you are free men, fighting for the blessings of Liberty
that slavery will be your portion, and that of your posterity, if you do not acquit yourselves like men. ~ George Washington

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

If a man really believes that God once upheld slavery; that he commanded soldiers to kill women and babes; that he believed in polygamy; that he persecuted for opinion's sake; that he will punish forever, and that he hates an unbeliever, the effect in my judgment will be bad. It always has been bad. This belief built the dungeons of the Inquisition. This belief made the Puritan murder the Quaker. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

As a people, we have been tolled farther and farther away from the facts of what we have done by the romanticizers, whose bait is nothing more than the wishful insinuation that we have done no harm. Speaking a public language of propaganda, uninfluenced by the real content of our history which we know only in a deep and guarded privacy, we are still in the throes of the paradox of the "gentleman and soldier."
However conscious it may have been, there is no doubt in my mind that all this moral and verbal obfuscation is intentional. Nor do I doubt that its purpose is to shelter us from the moral anguish implicit in our racism - an anguish that began, deep and mute, in the minds of Christian democratic freedom-loving owners of slaves. ~ Wendell Berry

I wanted to touch on how we look on each other. Good hair, light skin, you must be smart; if you're black, you're dark-skinned, you're ugly. That really happens. This is something that started with slavery, when they divided the house, and it's still a part of today's society and things that we battle with. ~ Rapsody

Is not the very beginning of privilege, monopoly and industrial slavery this erecting of the ballot-box above the individual? ~ Benjamin Tucker

Hey Americans," he screamed furiously at the drones.
"Brothers of the wolf, sisters of the wind, children of the Sun! Send the Choctaw warrior a quick and merciful death, instead of abandoning us into slavery or shameful capture. ~ George Sorbane

We have to make it clear to the multi-nationals that slavery is too high a price to pay for cheap goods ~ Kevin Bales

Frederick Douglass had to teach himself how to read before standing up to defeat slavery. ~ Juan Williams

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

I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ignorance is the worst form of slavery. (Paraphrased) ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

We don't want any relationship! we just need someone who listen us, who is ready to do anything for us without saying no. In short we just need one slave! ~ Sid

Just one more line, please. I'll do anything. And I mean anything."
"Good, we've got him hooked," said Ryan. "It won't be long now before he's on heroin."
Josie added, "Then it's just slavery, pedophilia, and murder."
"Don't forget incest," said Flora. ~ Aiden Shaw

For the man in the street, the philosophies of opposites, particularly Good and Evil, have served as a torture chamber, a crucifix made from metaphor. Thrust into a world which views him as the property of Gods and States and overwhelmed by an unrepayable debt, the metaphysics of slavery and the facts of pain, pleasure and death; bolstered by science, whose theorists have become the whores of the state, man is now informed that he is ill. The proof of this is his refusal to submit completely. The world debt is due to his saying 'no' to total slavery. He will not obey. We are at War, and man is the enemy. The question is: Who is on the other side? ~ Christopher S. Hyatt

Nobody can return to you something that was never yours, to begin with. Let's trace back to the history of your race: the humans were made for slavery and were found faulty for that purpose. They showed immense energy and willpower only when confronted against tremendous obstacles with no weapons in their hands. With those bare hands, and the wits that exceeded even those of their creators and equalled the ones of mighty gods, they could break mountains. Once the humans earned at least a bit of benevolence from their creators, though, they'd immediately turn into lazy drunkards feasting upon the luxuries of life. They were quite haughty creatures, at that – one could never make them work without posing a certain purpose before their eyes. They should be given an aim they approved of, or else, they'd move no finger! Yet, if such necessities were met, they'd begin to loaf around. Forbidding them to taste those luxuries? Nay, they obeyed not! Hence, their creators cast them down on Earth – a planet inhabited by many other faulty experiments of different alien species, so that their lives would end. Yet even here, the humans defied their creators – instead of dying out, they adapted to the environment they were cast in, due to their boundless wits and the unexplainable willpower that no other species could ever possess. They mated the local species whom they could more or less find a common language with, killed off the obstacles, and conquered the planet as their own. The conque ~ Tamuna Tsertsvadze

Marriage is an institution fits in perfect harmony with the laws of nature; whereas systems of slavery and segregation were designed to brutally oppress people and thereby violated the laws of nature. ~ Jack Kingston

Nothing could be more jolting and discordant with the vision of today's intellectuals than the fact that it was businessmen, devout religious leaders and Western imperialists who together destroyed slavery around the world. And if it doesn't fit their vision, it is the same to them as if it never happened. ~ Thomas Sowell

Political liberty, what are we to understand by that? Perhaps the individual's independence of the State and its laws? No; on the contrary, the individual's subjection in the State and to the State's laws ... Political liberty means that the polis, the State, is free; freedom of religion that religion is free, as freedom of conscience signifies that conscience is free; not, therefore, that I am free from the State, from religion, from conscience, or that I am rid of them. It does not mean my liberty, but the liberty of a power that rules and subjugates me; it means that one of my despots, like State, religion, conscience, is free. State, religion, conscience, these despots, make me a slave, and their liberty is my slavery. ~ Max Stirner

A religious woman is a slave that advocates the slavery. ~ M.F. Moonzajer

I wouldn't say that religion has promoted the social progress of mankind. I say that it has been a detriment to the progress of civilization, and I would also say this: that the emancipation of the mind from religious superstition is as essential to the progress of civilization as is emancipation from physical slavery. ~ Culbert Olson

Submitting self to God is the only real freedom - because the deepest slavery is self-dependence, self-reliance. When you live your life believing that everything (family, finances, relationships, career) depends primarily on you, you're enslaved to your strengths and weaknesses. You're trying to be your own savior. Freedom comes when we start trusting in God's abilities and wisdom instead of our own. Real life begins when we transfer our trust from our own efforts to the efforts of Christ. ~ Tullian Tchividjian

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

It is this outer reach of existential abnegation – the moment where subjective identity deserts itself and becomes enslaved without consciousness of its subjugated condition – that Mirbeau consistently sought to decry with horror. ~ Emily Apter

The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads in the Civil War and justified it. ~ Dan Savage

When any system has for its goal the advancement of the system over the betterment of its individual members, such a system is embedded in slavery. ~ Gerry Spence

One of the most tragic things about slavery was the mental enslavement, the way they made us believe that we were worth nothing; and that's what she's fighting against. ~ Jurnee Smollett

The crisis is arrived when we must assert our rights, or submit to every imposition, that can be heaped upon us, till custom and use shall make us as tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway. ~ George Washington

Where's the goddamn giant? ~ Jason Aaron

We must face the ultimate contradiction that our free and democratic society was made possible by massive slave labor. ~ David Brion Davis

Serving one's own passions is the greatest slavery. ~ Thomas Fuller

What a world it is, Cora thought, that makes a living prison into your only haven. Was she out of bondage or in its web: how to describe the status of a runaway? ~ Colson Whitehead

I had a lot of hatred, but I realized that kind of hate didn't do much. I had to start fueling myself with pride. We owe the ancestors that. So many of the souls who died in bondage just want us to recognize their struggle. ~ Marilyn Nelson