We can apply to slavery no worse name than its own. Men have always shrunk instinctively from this state, as the most degraded. No punishment, save death, has been more dreaded; and, to avoid it, death has often been endured. Slavery virtually dissolves the domestic relations. It ruptures the most sacred ties upon earth. It violates home. It lacerates best affections; produces and gives license to cruelty; compels the master systematically to degrade the mind of the slave; and to resist that improvement which is the design and end of the Creator.—Millions may rise up and tell me that the slave suffers little from cruelty. I know too much of human nature, human history, and human passion, to believe them.
—William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) American Unitarian Theologian, Poet
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 (1855–1920) South African Writer, Feminist
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 (1915–59) American Jazz Singer
Englishmen will never be slaves; they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allow them to do.
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish Playwright
The man who gives me employment, which I must have or suffer, that man is my master, let me call him what I will.
—Henry George (1839–97) American Political Economist, Journalist
Slavery is founded on the selfishness of man’s nature—opposition to it on his love of justice. These principles are in eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) American Head of State
It does not matter what the whip is; it is none the less a whip, because you have cut thongs for it out of your own souls.
—John Ruskin (1819–1900) English Writer, Art Critic
Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil.
—Edmund Burke (1729–97) British Philosopher, Statesman
The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions; the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. The hour of emancipation must come; but whether it will be brought on by the generous energies of our own minds, or by the bloody scenes of St. Domingo, is a leaf of our history not yet turned over. The Almighty has no attribute which can take sides with us in such a contest.
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) American Head of State, Lawyer
Most people seek after what they do not possess and are enslaved by the very things they want to acquire.
—Anwar el-Sadat (1918–81) Egyptian Head of State, Political leader
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 (b.1934) American Lawyer, Consumer Activist
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 (1789–1851) American Novelist
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 (1909–1943) French Philosopher, Political Activist
The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
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 (1817–62) American Philosopher
Captivity is the greatest of all evils that can befall one.
—Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) Spanish Novelist
Nobody had ever instructed him that a slave-ship, with a procession of expectant sharks in its wake, is a missionary institution, by which closely-packed heathen are brought over to enjoy the light of the Gospel.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–96) American Abolitionist, Author
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.
—Winston Churchill (1874–1965) British Head of State, Political leader, Historian, Journalist, Author
The creation of the spiritual was no accident. It was a creation born of necessity, so that the slave might more adequately adjust himself to the conditions of the New World.
—Benjamin Mays (1894–1984) American Minister, Educator, Scholar, Social Activist
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 (1907–73) British-born American Poet, Dramatist
I cannot be fired. Slaves have to be sold.
—Unknown
The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it.
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) American Head of State, Lawyer
The sovereign being is burdened with a servitude that crushes him, and the condition of free men is deliberate servility.
—Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French Essayist, Intellectual
Never may an act of possession be exercised upon a free being; the exclusive possession of a woman is no less unjust than the possession of slaves; all men are born free, all have equal rights: never should we lose sight of those principles; according to which never may there be granted to one sex the legitimate right to lay monopolizing hands upon the other, and never may one of the sexes, or classes, arbitrarily possess the other.
—Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) French Writer
Slavery is a state so improper, so degrading, so ruinous to the feelings and capacities of human nature, that it ought not to be suffered to exist.
—Edmund Burke (1729–97) British Philosopher, Statesman
From my earliest youth I have regarded slavery as a great moral and political evil.—I think it unjust, repugnant to the natural, equality of mankind, founded only in superior power; a standing and permanent conquest by the stronger over the weaker.—All pretence of defending it on the ground of different races, I have ever condemned, and have even said that if the black race is weaker, that is a reason against and not for its subjection and oppression.—In a religious point of view, I have ever regarded and spoken of it, not as subject to any express denunciation, either in the Old Testament or the New, but as opposed to the whole spirit of the gospel, and to the teachings of Jesus Christ.—The religion of Christ is a religion of kindness, justice, and brotherly love:—but slavery is not kindly affectionate; it does not seek another’s and not its own; it does not let the oppressed go free; it is but a continual act of oppression.
—Daniel Webster (1782–1852) American Statesman, Lawyer
Here lies the evil of slavery: Its whips, imprisonments, and even the horrors of the middle passage, are not to be named, in comparison with the extinction of the proper consciousness of a human being—with the degradation of a man into a brute.
—William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) American Unitarian Theologian, Poet
There is a law above all human enactments, written upon the heart by the finger of God; and while men despise fraud, and loathe rapine, and abhor blood, they shall reject with indignation the wild and guilty phantasy, that man can hold property in man.
—Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux (1778–1868) Scottish Jurist, Politician
Slavery takes hold of few, but many take hold of slavery.
—Seneca the Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca) (c.4 BCE–65 CE) Roman Stoic Philosopher, Statesman, Tragedian
The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.
—Bertrand A. Russell (1872–1970) British Philosopher, Mathematician, Social Critic
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