Slavery Quotes
Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and James Madison have the most entries. The page is not one-sided: George Fitzhugh, a proslavery writer, is fourth, so the arguments made at the time are on the record next to the condemnations. The sourced lines worth reading in full are Madison’s letters, to Lafayette in 1821, calling slavery a sad blot on our free country, and to F. Corbin in 1820. Goethe’s Elective Affinities (1809) is here for the opposite sort of remark: none are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
Three lines are flagged. One credited to Edward R. Murrow, “We used to own our slaves; now we just rent them,” is marked misattributed. A line about freeing thousands more if they had known they were slaves, credited to Harriet Tubman, and a passage addressed “To Americans” credited to Thomas Paine are disputed.
[During slavery,] Americans built a culture of speculation unique in its abandon.
Slavery in this Country I have seen hanging over it like a black cloud for half a century…
I hate it when they tell us how far we came to be, as if our people's history started with slavery.
The instrument of expansion of Classical civilization was a social organization, slavery.
Like slavery and piracy, terrorism has no place in the modern world.
He gave a concrete example of the effect of sex slavery, and for it he is imprisoned.
The current social system, with all its errors, is sustained by the ignorance and slavery of women.
A thatched roof once covered free men; under marble and gold dwells slavery.