Slavery Quotes

The sovereign being is burdened with a servitude that crushes him, and the condition of free men is deliberate servility.

Georges Bataille

Slavery is an institution for converting men into monkeys.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable.

Andrea Dworkin

I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.

Abraham Lincoln

I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.

Abraham Lincoln

But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself.

C.S. Lewis

We are told, that the subjection of Americans may tend to the diminution of our own liberties; an event, which none but very perspicacious politicians are able to foresee. If slavery be thus fatally contagious, how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?

Samuel Johnson

Slavery is now no where more patiently endured, than in countries once inhabited by the zealots of liberty

Samuel Johnson

Im Krieg machen die Starken die Schwachen zu Sklaven, im Frieden machen die Reichen die Armen zu Sklaven.

Oscar Wilde

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God cannot retain it.

Abraham Lincoln

If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away.

Abraham Lincoln

Today the large organization is lord and master, and most of its employees have been desensitized much as were the medieval peasants who never knew they were serfs.

Ralph Nader

If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might in a moral point of view justify revolution; certainly would if such right were a vital one. But such is not our case.

Abraham Lincoln

Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly, there is nothing left but quietism -- robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it.

George Orwell

The art of being a slave is to rule one's master.

Diogenes

The man who has no inner life is the slave of his surroundings.

Thomas La Mance

We are like horses who hurt themselves as soon as they pull on their bits -- and we bow our heads. We even lose consciousness of the situation, we just submit. Any re-awakening of thought is then painful.

Simone Weil

My reason is not framed to bend or stoop: my knees are.

Michel de Montaigne

A man is no less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years.

Lysander Spooner

You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.

Billie Holiday