SLAVERY QUOTES VII

quotations about slavery

If we would trace our descents, we should find all slaves to come from princes and all princes from slaves: But fortune has turned all things topsy-turvy, in a long story of revolutions.

WELLINS CALCOTT

Thoughts Moral and Divine

Tags: Wellins Calcott


The conflict between the principle of liberty and the fact of slavery is coming gradually to an issue. Slavery has now the power, and falls into convulsions at the approach of freedom. That the fall of slavery is predetermined in the counsels of Omnipotence I cannot doubt; it is a part of the great moral improvement in the condition of man, attested by all the records of history. But the conflict will be terrible, and the progress of improvement perhaps retrograde before its final progress to consummation.

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

journal, December 11, 1838

Tags: John Quincy Adams


Slave screams he spends his life learning conformity
Slave screams he claims he has his own identity
Slave screams he's going to cause the system to fall
Slave screams but he's glad to be chained to that wall

NINE INCH NAILS

"Happiness in Slavery"


My allegation
It's alright
Slave nation
Alright
Want to tell ya
All is gone
You're a slave nation
Right or wrong

SIMPLE MINDS

"Slave Nation"


So why do some people treat modern icons as if they were ancient relics, like marbles from the Parthenon? Fear. History isn't being erased, but it is being corrected. Relocating a Confederate statue to, say, a museum, is an acknowledgement that we see the naked emperor; we see through the contorted logic that it is possible to separate the Confederacy from the institution of slavery, that it's a whites-only story and slavery is blacks-only, and that treason is the same as patriotism.

LISA RICHARDSON

"A daughter of the Confederacy corrects history", Gulf Times, August 29, 2017


Slavery may, perhaps, be best compared to the infantile disease of measles; a complaint which so commonly attacks the young of humanity in their infancy, and when gone through at that period leaves behind it so few fatal marks; but which when it normally attacks the fully developed adult becomes one of the most virulent and toxic of diseases, often permanently poisoning the constitution where it does not end in death.

OLIVE SCHREINER

Thoughts on South Africa

Tags: Olive Schreiner


The slavemaster took Tom and dressed him well, and fed him well, and even gave him a little education -- a little education; gave him a long coat and a top hat and made all the other slaves look up to him. Then he used Tom to control them. The same strategy that was used in those days is used today, by the same white man.

MALCOLM X

Message to the Grass Roots, November 10, 1963

Tags: Malcolm X


The prospect in the United States is certainly not favorable to the perfection of the race of man, nor to the duration of the good institutions we live under. Injudicious attempts to liberate the slaves that swarm in this land of liberty seem far more likely to lead us back to anarchy, or more certainly to war and bloodshed than to any political millennium. And the bonds of government are everywhere loosening to the manifest benefit of the unruly rather than to the encouragement of the peaceful.

CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS

diary, July 1837

Tags: Charles Francis Adams, Sr.


Slavery is not an institution worthy of pride. What is worthy of pride was that we, as a nation, united, eventually stood for human dignity and liberty for all.

SUSAN APPLEGATE

"Those opposed to racism aren't the violent ones", The News-Review, August 24, 2017


I can empathize with people whose ancestors were treated like cattle, families regularly separated at auction houses, children then made to work long hours in the fields. Looking upon the Civil War monuments that celebrated the glory and righteousness of slavery would communicate to me that, "You should still be slaves and we resent it that you're not." These are memorials to the antithesis of freedom and liberty.

SUSAN APPLEGATE

"Those opposed to racism aren't the violent ones", The News-Review, August 24, 2017