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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.

Random quote on Slavery

Most quoted on slavery:

I will not, I cannot justify it.

Patrick Henry Letter to Robert Pleasants (1773)

The day of happiness will be the memorable day of the emancipation of the people, and the day of emancipation will be the one when the great are put down and the small raised up; when there are neither masters nor slaves; bosses nor subordinates; powerful nor weak; oppressors nor oppressed; but when the vast Brazil is called the common homeland of Brazilian citizens or United States of Brazil.

Luís Gama

I would not have a slave to till my ground,
To carry me, to fan me while I sleep,
And tremble when I wake, for all the wealth
That sinews bought and sold have ever earn'd.

William Cowper The Task (1785)

Time-servers are the cowering slaves of slaves,
Alone on earth, who serves the Lord is free,
Each soul shall win the gift that it most craves;
Seek God, my soul — God shall your portion be!

Judah Halevi

I never mean, unless some particular circumstances should compel me to do it, to possess another slave by purchase, it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery in this country may be abolished by law.

George Washington

Our people had been so long accustomed to the practice and convenience of having slaves, that very few among them even doubted the propriety and rectitude of it. Some liberal and conscientious men had indeed, by their conduct and writings, drawn the lawfulness of slavery into question.

John Jay

If my present theme were the institution of slavery in general, I should endeavour to show that it has been a mighty instrument not for evil only, but for good in the providential order of the world. Almighty God, in His mysterious ways, has poured down blessings even through servitude itself, by awakening the spirit of sacrifice on the one hand, and the spirit of charity on the other.

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

Do not allow yourself to be thrashed by the provoking whip of a beautiful face. How can sense slaves enjoy the world? Its subtle flavours escape them while they grovel in primal mud. All nice discriminations are lost to the man of elemental lusts.

Yukteswar Giri Autobiography of a Yogi (1946)

I have long thought that our vacant territory was the resource which, in some mode or other, was most applicable and adequate as a gradual cure for the portentous evil; without, however, being unaware that even that would encourage serious difficulties of different sorts.

James Madison

Slavery is hard history, it is hard to comprehend the inhumanity that defined it. It is hard to discuss the violence that sustained it. It is hard to teach the ideology of white supremacy that justified it. And it is hard to learn about those who abided it.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries

The rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.

Jesus

I congratulate you, my dear friend, on the law of your state for suspending the importation of slaves, and for the glory you have justly acquired by endeavoring to prevent it forever. This abomination must have an end, and there is a superior bench reserved in heaven for those who hasten it.

Thomas Jefferson Letter to Edward Rutledge (1787)

I believe a time will come when an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil. Everything we do is to improve it, if it happens in our day; if not, let us transmit to our descendants, together with our slaves, a pity for their unhappy lot and an abhorrence of slavery.

Patrick Henry Letter to Robert Pleasants (1773)

The state of slavery is in its own nature bad. It is neither useful to the master nor to the slave; not to the slave, because he can do nothing through a motive of virtue; nor to the master, because by having an unlimited authority over his slaves he insensibly accustoms himself to the want of all moral virtues, and thence becomes fierce, hasty, severe, choleric, voluptuous, and cruel.

Montesquieu

What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment and death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment, be deaf to all those motives whose powers supported him through his trial, and inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.

Thomas Jefferson

you who feel the sobs of the homeland that breathes slavery

Julia de Burgos Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos (1982)

Kindly remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives and dies. It is just as possible for you to see in him a free-born man as for him to see in you a slave.

Seneca the Younger

The laws of certain states …give an ownership in the service of negroes as personal property…. But being men, by the laws of God and nature, they were capable of acquiring liberty—and when the captor in war …thought fit to give them liberty, the gift was not only valid, but irrevocable.

Alexander Hamilton Philo Camillus no. 2 (1795)

Now, as then, commerce unrestrained by social control ends up stripping economic relations of all moral content, while the drive toward fulfilling market demands at the lowest possible price creates widespread indifference to the conditions under which marketable goods are produced. Today’s Chinatown sweatshops and Third World child labor factories are the functional equivalents of colonial slavery in that the demands of the consumer and the profit drive of the entrepreneur overwhelm the rights of those whose labor actually produces the salable commodity.

Eric Foner Plantation Profiteering (1997)

Expediency governed the slave-holders' posture toward female slaves: when it was profitable to exploit them as if they were men, they were regarded, in effect, as genderless, but when they could be exploited, punished and repressed in ways suited only for women, they were locked into their exclusively female roles.

Angela Davis

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