Slavery Quotes

Slavery can only be abolished by raising the character of the people who compose the nation; and that can be done only by showing them a higher one.

Maria Weston Chapman

Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.

Plato

We had a little slave boy whom we had hired from some one, there in Hannibal. He was from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and had been brought away from his family and his friends, half way across the American continent, and sold. He was a cheery spirit, innocent and gentle, and the noisiest creature that ever was, perhaps. All day long he was singing, whistling, yelling, whooping, laughing - it was maddening, devastating, unendurable. At last, one day, I lost all my temper, and went raging to my mother, and said Sandy had been singing for an hour without a single break, and I couldn't stand it, and wouldn't she please shut him up.The tears came into her eyes, and her lip trembled, and she said something like this - 'Poor thing, when he sings, it shows that he is not remembering, and that comforts me; but when he is still, I am afraid he is thinking, and I cannot bear it. He will never see his mother again; if he can sing, I must not hinder it, but be thankful for it. If you were older, you would understand me; then that friendless child's noise would make you glad.' It was a simple speech, and made up of small words, but it went home, and Sandy's noise was not a trouble to me any more.

Mark Twain

It cannot in the opinion of His Majesty's Government be classified as slavery in the extreme acceptance of the word without some risk of terminological inexactitude.

Sir Winston Churchill

If the cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. Because the goal of America is freedom, abused and scorned tho' we may be, our destiny is tied up with America's destiny.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Most people seek after what they do not possess and are enslaved by the very things they want to acquire.

Anwar ElSadat

I pity them greatly, but I must be mum, for how could we do without sugar and rum?

William Cowper

Forced from home, and all its pleasures, afric coast I left forlorn; to increase a stranger's treasures, o the raging billows borne. Men from England bought and sold me, paid my price in paltry gold; but, though theirs they have enroll'd me, minds are never to be sold.

William Cowper

Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey his master's commands when, in fact, he is obliged to. Most slaves of habit suffer from this delusion and so do some writers, enslaved by an all too personal style.

W. H. Auden

The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a priveleged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.

Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee

There're two people in the world that are not likeable: a master and a slave.

Nikki Giovanni

Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil.

Edmund Burke

Wherever slavery is, it has been first introduced without law. The oldest laws we find concerning it, are not laws introducing it; but regulating it, as an already existing thing.

Abraham Lincoln

Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.

William Shakespeare

If any man ascribes anything of salvation, even the very least thing, to the free will of man, he knows nothing of grace, and he has not learned Jesus Christ rightly

Martin Luther King Jr.

Men would rather be starving and free than fed in bonds.

Pearl Buck

If you are living out of a sense of obligation you are slave.

Wayne Dyer

Slavery is no more sinful, by the Christian code, than it is sinful to wear a whole coat, while another is in tatters, to eat a better meal than a neighbor, or otherwise to enjoy ease and plenty, while our fellow creatures are suffering and in want.

James Fenimore Cooper

We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued. The slaves were undeniably a element of strength to those who had their service, and we must decide whether that element should be with us or against us. Emancipation, will strike at the heart of the rebellion. <br/><br/>Said to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles.

Abraham Lincoln

Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.

Oscar Wilde