quotations about slavery
But there's no such thing as free. There are only different and more horrible ways to be enslaved.
LAUREN DESTEFANO
Fever
Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.... The subjection of individuals will increase amongst democratic nations, not only in the same proportion as their equality, but in the same proportion as their ignorance.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE
Democracy in America
A slave is but half a man.
ARISTOPHANES
attributed, Day's Collacon
All mankind is divided, as it was at all times and is still, into slaves and freemen; for whoever has not two-thirds of his day for himself is a slave, be he otherwise whatever he likes, statesman, merchant, official, or scholar.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Complete Works: The First Complete and Authorised English Translation, Volume 6
X is not my real name, but if you study history you'll find why no black man in the western hemisphere knows his real name. Some of his ancestors kidnapped our ancestors from Africa, and took us into the western hemisphere and sold us there. And our names were stripped from us and so today we don't know who we really are. I am one of those who admit it and so I just put X up there to keep from wearing his name.
MALCOLM X
Oxford Union Debate, December 3, 1964
They keep on talking, they're oh so proud
They keep us walking, they scream so loud
They own the venue, they own he crowd
Hey, yeah, slavery
RICHIE HAVENS
"Fates"
Let every voice be thunder, let every heart beat strong
Until all tyrants perish our work shall not be done
Let not our memories fail us the lost year shall be found
Let slavery's chains be broken the whole wide world around.
PETER, PAUL & MARY
"Because All Men Are Brothers"
Gluttonized foundation
Well versed in the art of slavery
Patrons of feudal interest
Scurry around a concrete beehive
Crazed civilization frantically going nowhere
DISCORDANCE AXIS
"Empire"
If there is a State, there must be domination of one class by another and, as a result, slavery; the State without slavery is unthinkable -- and this is why we are the enemies of the State.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
"Statism and Anarchy"
Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone.... I never yet met with, or heard of, a judge who was not a slave of this kind, and so the finest and most unfailing weapon of injustice. He fetches a slightly higher price than the black men only because he is a more valuable slave.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
journal, December 4, 1860
Jaws of greed shine of green salivate
Force feed until gums bleed in slavery
Bottled trapped lifeless meat
Are you the leasher or the one being leashed?
HIS HERO IS GONE
"Leash"
Servants to mother machine
Nursed by video screens
Paradise of insanity
Born into a grave of
Mental slavery
KREATOR
"Mental Slavery"
Once slavery in America was not seen as radical. It became, instead, a revolutionary idea that slaves should be freed. When we have lived under a pernicious power long enough, no matter how oppressive, we grow so accustomed to the yoke that its removal seems frightening, even wrong.
GERRY L. SPENCE
From Freedom to Slavery
The turpitude, the inhumanity, the cruelty, and the infamy of the African commerce in slaves have been so impressively represented to the public by the highest powers of eloquence that nothing that I can say would increase the just odium in which it is and ought to be held. Every measure of prudence, therefore, ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States.
JOHN ADAMS
letter to T. Robert J. Evans, June 8, 1819
I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate. I suspected that these moans were from a tortured slave, for I was told that this was the case in another instance. Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have staid in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal. I have seen a little boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a horse-whip (before I could interfere) on his naked head, for having handed me a glass of water not quite clean; I saw his father tremble at a mere glance from his master's eye. ... And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one's blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty.
CHARLES DARWIN
The Voyage of the Beagle
Do you, do you remember those days of slavery?
It wasn't black man alone, who died thru bravery.
'Though some a dem threw dem self over board,
because dis ya slaveship overload.
EEK-A-MOUSE
"Do You Remember"
Better freedom with a crust, than slavery with every luxury.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
It seemed to me much more than the mere question whether the negro should remain in slavery; that it really involved the question whether liberty should be strangled on the continent dedicated to liberty.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
Now the slave emerges as a freeman; all the rigid, hostile walls which either necessity or despotism has erected between men are shattered. Now that the gospel of universal harmony is sounded, each individual becomes not only reconciled to his fellow but actually one with him -- as though the veil of Maya had been torn apart and there remained only shreds floating before the vision of mystical Oneness.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Nietzsche Selections
Ye men of sense and virtue -- Ye advocates for American liberty, rouse up and espouse the cause of humanity and general liberty. Bear a testimony against a vice which degrades human nature, and dissolves that universal tie of benevolence which should connect all the children of men together in one great family -- The plant of liberty is of so tender a nature, that it cannot thrive long in the neighbourhood of slavery.
BENJAMIN RUSH
"On Slavekeeping", 1773