Profoundly inspirational slavery quotes will challenge the way you think, change the way you live and transform your whole life.
Famous Slavery Quotes
If there is a State, then there is domination, and in turn, there is slavery. — Mikhail Bakunin
We have the potential to help people out of poverty, out of disease, out of slavery and out of conflict. Too often, we turn the other way because we think there’s nothing we can do. — Alicia Keys
The legacy of slavery comes from the sustained political, legal and economic effort to link permanently an entire group of people to poverty – and to mystify that systematic disenfranchisement by making up something called race, which could serve as a distraction. — Sarah Churchwell
Slavery is illegal everywhere, but it exists all over the world. — Lisa Kristine
This is slavery, not to speak one’s thought. — Euripides
Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery. — Robert Green Ingersoll
Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. — Nelson Mandela
Slavery is something that affects all of us. It’s all of our history. — John Ridley
The power of the ballot we need in sheer defense, else what shall save us from a second slavery? — W. E. B. Du Bois
Slavery was regarded by Aristotle as an ordinance of nature, and so probably was it by the slaves themselves in olden time. — Alfred Marshall
If you don’t feel apologetic for slavery, if you don’t feel apologetic for colonialism, if you feel proud of it then say that. — Jesse Jackson
No slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man. — Thomas Huxley
I’ve heard ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ read, and I tell you Mrs. Stowe’s pen hasn’t begun to paint what slavery is as I have seen it at the far South. I’ve seen de real thing, and I don’t want to see it on no stage or in no theater. — Harriet Tubman
Sir, there is no Christian nation, thus free to choose as we are, which would establish slavery. — William H. Seward
I didn’t know I was a slave until I found out I couldn’t do the things I wanted. — Frederick Douglass
If you are living out of a sense of obligation you are slave. — Wayne Dyer
Difficult as it was to hear, slavery has benefited descendants like me – I believe there is a superior athletic gene in us. — Michael Johnson
As I often say, we have come a long way from the days of slavery, but in 2014, discrimination and inequality still saturate our society in modern ways. Though racism may be less blatant now in many cases, its existence is undeniable. — Al Sharpton
Slavery, if it can be legalized at all, can be legalized only by positive legislation. Natural law gives it no aid. Custom imparts to it no legal sanction. — Lysander Spooner
I declare and protest in advance, that I do not intend, at this time at least; to be drawn or driven into the question of slavery, in either of its subdivisions or forms. — Caleb Cushing
Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery. — Andy Warhol
If the states had to vote on slavery, we would have lost the vote. — Jesse Jackson
You can’t regulate child labor. You can’t regulate slavery. Some things are just wrong. — Michael Moore
Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery. — Bertrand Russell
No nation ever yet found any inconvenience from too close an inspection into the conduct of its officers, but many have been brought to ruin and reduced to slavery by suffering gradual impositions and abuses. — Edward Livingston
By the law of Christ, every man is bound to love his neighbour as himself; but every servant is a neighbour of every civil lord; therefore every civil lord must love any of his servants as himself; but by natural instinct, every lord abhors slavery; therefore, by the law of charity, he is bound not to impose slavery on any brother in Christ. — John Wycliffe
I call for a march from exploitation to education, from poverty to shared prosperity, a march from slavery to liberty, and a march from violence to peace. — Kailash Satyarthi
I had crossed the line. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land. — Harriet Tubman
What we forget is that African Americans made the largest contribution to America, economically, before the Civil War of any sector of society. I read that the railroads were worth about $2 billion, but slavery was a $3 billion asset. — Andrew Young
The compact which exists between the North and the South is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. — William Lloyd Garrison
You can be out of slavery and have the right to vote, but unless you have access to capital, industry and technology, you can’t fulfill your dreams. — Jesse Jackson
There are two things that have always haunted me: the brutality of the European traders and the stories I’ve heard about Africans selling other Africans into slavery. — Henry Louis Gates
People-trafficking is modern day slavery. There are more slaves today than there were at the height of the slave trade. — Ross Kemp
For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery. — Jonathan Swift
The whole story of the comfort women, the system of forced sexual slavery, the medical experiments of Unit 731, is not something that is in the US psyche. That is changing because many books are coming out. — Iris Chang
Racism is an effect of slavery, not the other way around. Once slavery was abolished, not only did racism not disappear, neither did the economic system it upheld. — Sarah Churchwell
Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom. — Alexis de Tocqueville
The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and to be bought for it. — John Ruskin
The challenges African-Americans are facing today are rooted in the system of slavery. — Charles Rangel
No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery. — Harriet Ann Jacobs
I think we must get rid of slavery or we must get rid of freedom. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
My first recollection of hearing Wendell Phillips is from my college days, though of course he was always one of my heroes, and I may have heard him before, for we were an anti-slavery family. — George Edward Woodberry
There is not only no free state which would now establish it, but there is no slave state, which, if it had had the free alternative as we now have, would have founded slavery. — William H. Seward
I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves. — Harriet Tubman
They all agree, they are all unanimous in Congress, in the States, on the rostrum, in the sanctuary – everywhere they declare that slavery shall not go into the Territories. — Robert Toombs
Carry out the republican principle of universal suffrage, or strike it from your banners and substitute ‘Freedom and Power to one half of society, and Submission and Slavery to the other.’ — Ernestine Rose
We can constitutionally extirpate slavery at this time. — Robert Dale Owen
It states, History should be regarded as a means for understanding the past and solving the challenges of the future. It also suggests that this celebration of the end of slavery is an important and enriching part of the history and heritage of the United States. — Mark Foley
Without peace, there is no freedom, individual or national. War and hostilities are a form of slavery. — Klas Pontus Arnoldson
The wealthy have never liked to pay for the labor that enriches them. Ever since slavery was eliminated, they have been trying to keep it as close to slavery as they can without violating the slave laws. — Michael Moore
Our concern, however, is with slavery as it is, and not with any theory of it. — Gerrit Smith
Racism is a way to gain economic advantage at the expense of others. Slavery and plantations may be gone, but racism still allows us to regard those who may keep us from financial gain as less than equals. — Alveda King
Every emancipation has in it the seeds of a new slavery, and every truth easily becomes a lie. — I. F. Stone
The married woman as family provider beside the man, often also in place of the man, but always however subservient to the man’s dominion – this is the worst form of woman slavery our time has created. — Ellen Key
To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father. — Virginia Woolf
When every one of your arguments is characterized an attempt to bring back slavery or resegregate lunch counters, it’s a little hard to have any sort of productive debate. — Ann Coulter
The history of American democracy, to say the least, has been checkered. Our nation was founded at a time when people of African descent were held in bondage. After slavery was abolished, they were forced to endure legal discrimination for another 100 years. — Bernie Sanders
You cannot afford a world with slavery, which literally takes someone and turns them into a machine. — Andrew Forrest
Frederick Douglass had to teach himself how to read before standing up to defeat slavery. — Juan Williams
Even if the Constitution of the United States had intended to recognize slavery, as a constitutional state institution, such intended recognition would have failed of effect, and been legally void, because slavery then had no constitutional existence to be recognized. — Lysander Spooner
It, sometimes, suits the slaveholders to claim, that their slavery is an exclusively State concern; and that the North has, therefore, nothing to do with it. — Gerrit Smith
Decolonization actually boosted slavery. As foreign powers withdrew from the colonies, people were enslaved by their own countrymen. And we see it in Africa, we see it in Asia. — Loretta Napoleoni
The Israelites’ slavery in Egypt is the equivalent of our slavery to sin. God sent Moses to deliver them from bondage, and He sent Jesus Christ to set us free. — Joyce Meyer
From that date the abandonment of the older State proceeded with a rapidity never before known, and with it grew the domestic slave trade and the pro-slavery feeling. — Henry Charles Carey
Some slaves are scoured to their work by whips, others by their restlessness and ambition. — John Ruskin
If not now, then when? If not you, then who? If we are able to answer these fundamental questions, then perhaps we can wipe away the blot of human slavery — Kailash Satyarthi
In England, theres no acknowledgement the invention of slavery came from Britain. — Chiwetel Ejiofor
True, permanent peace can never be restored, until slavery, the occasion of the war, has ceased. — Gerrit Smith
It is manifestly vital to the success of the anti-slavery cause, that the authority and influence of proslavery, especially of slaveholding, ministers should be destroyed. — Gerrit Smith
As legal slavery passed, we entered into a permanent period of unemployment and underemployment from which we have yet to emerge. — Julian Bond
The augmentation of slaves weakens the states; and such a trade is diabolical in itself, and disgraceful to mankind. — George Mason
The secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition. — Harriet Ann Jacobs
I do not weep: I loathe tears, for they are a sign of slavery. — Max Beckmann
The problem for those who assert biblical authority in support of traditional definitions of marriage is that one could, with equal validity, assert that the lending of money or certain kinds of haircuts are forbidden by God, or that slavery and the subjugation of women are authorized by the Lord. — Jon Meacham
If Liberia has failed, then, it is no evidence of the failure of the Negro in government. It is merely evidence of the failure of slavery. — Carter G. Woodson
I need say no more, to prove that slavery is entirely unlike the servitude in the patriarchal families. — Gerrit Smith
The proceedings of this House in 1790, in reference to petitions on the matter of the slave trade, and of slavery in the States, have been cited. It has been said that those petitions were not received. — Caleb Cushing
Slavery is the first step towards civilization. In order to develop it is necessary that things should be much better for some and much worse for others, then those who are better off can develop at the expense of others. — Alexander Herzen
What slavery really demonstrated was that we don’t really know how to use energy wisely and that we can be incredibly abusive and barbaric. — Andrew Nikiforuk
The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads in the Civil War and justified it. — Dan Savage
I will to my dying day oppose, with all the powers and faculties God has given me, all such instruments of slavery on the one hand and villainy on the other as this Writ of Assistance is. — James Otis
I read a funny story about how the Republicans freed the slaves. The Republicans are the ones who created slavery by law in the 1600’s. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and he was not a Republican. — Marion Barry
We must continue to judge of slavery by what it is, and not by what you tell us it will, or may be. — Gerrit Smith
In this country protection has always, to some extent, existed; but at some times it has been efficient, and at others not; and our tendency toward freedom or slavery has always been in the direct ratio of its efficiency or inefficiency. — Henry Charles Carey
Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature – opposition to it is his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow. — Abraham Lincoln
Slavery didnt break up the black families as much as liberal welfare rules. — Andrew Young
Slavery is nothing to joke about. The history of this nation’s involvement with slavery is nothing to pass off in a joke. — Douglas Wilder
In the nineteenth century, slavery was the greatest wrong, and government never stood so tall as when it was redressing that wrong. — William Weld
The sin of slavery is one of which it may be said that without the shedding of blood there is no remission. — James A. Garfield
But when you see personal artifacts relating to – by genealogy at least – a living human being, it was just more impressive to me than just about anything I’ve ever read about slavery before. — Bob Edwards
Racism, xenophobia and unfair discrimination have spawned slavery, when human beings have bought and sold and owned and branded fellow human beings as if they were so many beasts of burden. — Desmond Tutu
To some extent I liken slavery to death. — Marcus Tullius Cicero
And who is responsible for this appalling child slavery? Everyone. — Mother Jones
I welcomed the organization of the Anti-slavery Society. — Gerrit Smith
Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment. — Huey Newton
I am amazed at the facility with which some men follow in the wake of slavery. — Benjamin F. Wade
I speak on due consideration because Britain, France, and Mexico, have abolished slavery, and all other European states are preparing to abolish it as speedily as they can. — William H. Seward
The fact that slavery is written into the Constitution is about as entrenched a form of classism as you could possibly imagine. — Beau Willimon
I appeal to you, my friends, as mothers: are you willing to enslave your children? You stare back with horror and indignation at such questions. But why, if slavery is not wrong to those upon whom it is imposed? — Angelina Grimke
Slavery was not a bad day on the job. It was not your boss yelling at you. It was not hard work for little pay. This was a full system of human subjugation. — John Ridley
