Quotes about slave (1439 quotes, page 12)

“The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave's virtue.”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

Fate , Hope , Time

“For nearly three quarters of a century, Jim Crow imposed on free Negroes a regime in many respects harsher than slavery. The persons of slaves received a certain protection from the fact that they were valuable property, a protection that was stripped from them after they were free.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

Source: 2000s, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000), p. 526

Personality

“This chapter [of the destruction of temples], however, though significant, was only a part of the Muslim behaviour-pattern as recorded by Muslim historians of medieval India. The other parts were:
1) mass slaughter of people not only during war but also after the armies of Islam had emerged victorious;
2) capture of large numbers of non-combatant men, women and children as booty and their sale as slaves all over the Islamic world;
3) forcible conversion to Islam of people who were in no position to resist;
4) reduction to the status of zimmis or non-citizens of all those who could not be converted and imposition of inhuman disabilities on them;
5) emasculation of the zimmis by preventing them from possessing arms;
6) impoverishment of the zimmis through heavy discriminatory taxes and misappropriation of a major part of what the peasants produced;
7) ruination of the native and national culture of the zimmis by suppressing and holding in contempt all its institutions and expressions.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume I (1990)

Women , Men , War , Children

“Oh for a tongue to curse the slave
Whose treason, like a deadly blight,
Comes o'er the councils of the brave,
And blasts them in their hour of might!”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

Lalla Rookh http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/lallarookh/index.html (1817), Part V-VIII: The Fire-Worshippers

“The slaves of developed industrial civilization are sublimated slaves.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 32

“My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact. I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

Source: 1840s, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), Ch. 10

“Praxagora: I want all to have a share of everything and all property to be in common; there will no longer be either rich or poor; […] I shall begin by making land, money, everything that is private property, common to all. […]
Blepyrus: But who will till the soil?
Praxagora: The slaves.”

Aristophanés (-448–-386 BC) Athenian playwright of Old Comedy

tr. O'Neill 1938, Perseus http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Aristoph.+Eccl.+590
Ecclesiazusae, line 590-591 & 597-598 & 651
Ecclesiazusae (392 BC)

Money

“The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world. The children and the aged and infirm, work not at all, and yet have all the comforts and necessaries of life provided for them. They enjoy liberty, because they are opposed neither by care nor labor.”

George Fitzhugh (1806–1881) American activist

Source: Cannibals All!, or Slaves Without Masters (1857), p. 29

Life , Children , People , Age

“The tyranny of necessity grants its slaves three kinds of freedom: opinion free from intellect, entertainment free from art, and orgies free from love.”

Karl Kraus (1874–1936) Czech playwright and publicist

“In these great times,” Harry Zohn, trans., In These Great Times (Montreal: 1976), p. 74

Love , Art , Freedom

“WE ARE IN THE MIDST OF AN EPIC CHANGE in the nature of work. The First Industrial Revolution ended slave and serf labor. The Second Industrial Revolution dramatically shrank agricultural and craft labor. The Third Industrial Revolution is sunsetting mass wage labor in the manufacturing and service industries and salaried professional labor in large parts of the knowledge sector.”

Jeremy Rifkin (1945) American economist

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (2014)

Nature , Knowledge , Change , Parting

“[Slaves, for instance, made good soldiers but] “they are of one group and one mind and there can be no permanent security against their revolt.””

Ziauddin Barani (1285–1357) Indian Muslim historian and political thinker (1285–1357)

Barani, Fatawa-i-Jahandari, pp.25-26. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 4
Fatawa-i-Jahandari

“To the Whigs of the seventeenth century we owe it that we have a House of Commons. To the Whigs of the nineteenth century we owe it that the House of Commons has been purified. The abolition of the slave-trade, the abolition of colonial slavery, the extension of popular education, the mitigation of the rigour of the penal code, all, all were effected by that party; and of that party, I repeat, I am a member. I look with pride on all that the Whigs have done for the cause of human freedom and of human happiness. I see them now hard pressed, struggling with difficulties, but still fighting the good fight. At their head I see men who have inherited the spirit and the virtues, as well as the blood, of old champions and martyrs of freedom…While one shred of the old banner is flying, by that banner will I at least be found.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

Speech http://www.bartleby.com/349/authors/133.html to the electors at Edinburgh (May 1839)

Men , Education , Freedom , Fight

“A word about Hayti. We are not to judge her by the height which the Anglo-Saxon has reached. We are to judge by the depths from which she has come. We are to look at the relation she sustained to the outside world, and the outside world sustained to her. One hundred years ago every civilized nation was slave-holding. Yet these negroes, ignorant, downtrodden, had the manhood to arise and drive off their masters and assert their liberty. Her government is not so unsteady as we think.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1890s, Speech at the Abolitionist Reunion in Boston (1890)

World , Thinking

“In returning I read a very different book, published by an honest Quaker, on that execrable sum of all villanies, commonly called the Slave-trade.”

John Wesley (1703–1791) Christian theologian

Journal (12 February 1772) after reading Some historical accounts of Guinea by Anthony Benezet
General sources

Books , Reading

“Suppose I broke away and left you, or made it impossible for you to stay. That I was base and false; in every way unworthy of your love, and it was clearly right for you to go, what would you do then?"
"Go away and–"
He interrupted with a triumphant laugh, "Die as heroines always do, tender slaves as they are.”

Louisa May Alcott A Long Fatal Love Chase

"No, live and forget you", was the unexpected reply.
Phillip and Rosamund, p. 46.
A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866)

Love , Way , Falseness , Forgetting

“I fight, with myself in the ring of doubt and fear
The rain ain't gone, but I can still see clear
As a child, given religion with no answer to why
Just told believe in Jesus cause for me he did die
Curiosity killed the catechism
Understanding and wisdom became the rhythm that I played to
And became a slave to master self
A rich man is one with knowledge, happiness and his health
My mind had dealt with the books of Zen, Tao the lessons
of the Koran and Bible,
to me they all vital
And got truth within 'em, gotta read them boys
You just can't skim 'em, different branches of belief
But one root that stem 'em, but people of the venom try to trim 'em
And use religion as an emblem
When it should be a natural way of life
Who am I or they to say to whom you pray ain't right?
That's who got you doin' right and got you this far
Whether you say "in Jesus name" or "Al hum du'Allah"
Long as you know it's a being that's supreme to you
You let that show towards others in the things you do
Cause when the trumpets blowin', 24 elders surround the throne
Only 144,000 gon get home”

Common (rapper) (1972) American rapper, actor and author from Illinois

"G.O.D. (Gaining One's Definition)" (Track 7)
Albums, One Day It'll All Make Sense (1997)

Life , Wisdom , People , Health

“But when we freed the slaves we did not say to them, 'Caste shall not grind you with the right hand, but it shall with the left'. We said, 'Caste shall not grind you at all, and you shall have the same guarantees of freedom that we have'. President Johnson defines the liberty springing from the Emancipation amendment as the right to labor and enjoy the fruit of labor to its fullest extent. It is easy to quarrel with this as with every definition. But it is good enough, and it is as true of Connecticut as of Missouri that no man fully enjoys the fruit of his labor who does not have an equality of right before the law and a voice in making the law. That is the final security of the commonwealth, and we are bound to help every citizen attain it, whether it be the foreigner who comes ignorant and wretched to our shores or the native whom a cruel prejudice opposes. Do you tell me that we have nothing to do with the State laws of Alabama? I answer that the people of the United States are the sole and final judges of the measures necessary to the full enjoyment of the freedom which they have anywhere bestowed. If we choose, we may trust a certain class in the unorganized States to secure this liberty, just as we might have chosen to trust Mister Vallandigham, Mister Horatio Seymour, and Mister Fernando Wood to carry on the war. But as we wanted honor and not dishonor, as we wanted victory and not surrender, we chose to trust it to Farragut and Sherman, to Sheridan and Grant. If you don't want a thing done, says the old proverb, send; if you do, go yourself. When Grant started. Uncle Sam went himself. So, if we don't care whether we keep our word to those whom we have freed, we may send, by leaving them to the tender mercies of those who despise and distrust them. But if we do care for our own honor and the national welfare, we shall go ourselves, and through a national bureau and voluntary associations of education and aid, or in some better way if it can be devised, keep fast hold of the hands of those whom the President calls our wards, and not relinquish those hands until we leave in them every guarantee of freedom that we ourselves enjoy.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

War , People , Education , Law

“I know that this is a pro-slavery rebellion, for it is nothing else. Slavery and rebellion are identical and freedom and loyalty are identical, and those slave-holders who are truly loyal will soon become abolitionists, for that is the logic of their position and they will see as I see, that slavery must perish and pro-slavery men will be secessionists.”

Owen Lovejoy (1811–1864) American politician

Speech https://books.google.com/books?id=qMEv8DNXVbIC&pg=PA293&dq=%22Pro-Slavery+Rebellion%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjtq-fys9zSAhWM4yYKHUaWBNIQ6AEIMjAE#v=onepage&q=%22Pro-Slavery%20Rebellion%22&f=false (January 1862)
1860s

Men , Freedom , Loyalty

“Writing about the days of Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlaq (1325-51), Shihabuddin Al-Umari writes:
“The Sultan never ceases to show the greatest zeal in making war upon the infidels… Every day thousands of slaves are sold at a very low price, so great is the number of prisoners… (that) the value at Delhi of a young slave girl, for domestic service, does not exceed eight tankahs. Those who are deemed fit to fill the parts of domestic and concubine sell for about fifteen tankahs. In other cities prices are still lower…” Probably it was so because Ibn Battuta while in Bengal says that a pretty Kaniz (slave girl) could be had there for one gold dinar (or 10 silver tankahs). “I purchased at this price a very beautiful slave girl whose name was Ashura. A friend of mine also bought a young slave named Lulu for two gold coins.”32…Umari continues, “but still, in spite of low price of slaves, 20000 tankahs, and even more, are paid for young Indian girls. I inquired the reason… and was told that these young girls are remarkable for their beauty, and the grace of their manners.””

Muhammad bin Tughluq (1290–1351) Turkic Sultan of Delhi

Battuta, Mahdi Husain, 235; Quaunah Turks, 155 n. ; Masalik-ul-Absar, E.D., III, 580-81. (Shihabuddin al-Umri, Masalik-ul-Absar fi Mumalik-ul-Amar) quoted from Lal, K. S. (1994). Muslim slave system in medieval India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 10

War , Beauty , Girl , Parting

“Give men an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to and they'll be proud to become her willing slaves.”

William Moulton Marston (1893–1947) American psychologist, lawyer, inventor and comic book writer

Are Comics Fascist?, as quoted in The Ages of Wonder Woman: Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing Times, edited by Joeph J Darowski, p.7 in the essay "William Marston's Feminist Agenda" by Michelle R. Finn, p.14.

Men

“Look at England, whose mighty power is now felt, and for centuries has been felt, all around the world. It is worthy of special remark, that precisely those parts of that proud island which have received the largest and most diversified populations, are to day the parts most distinguished for industry, enterprise, invention and general enlightenment. In Wales, and in the Highlands of Scotland the boast is made of their pure blood, and that they were never conquered, but no man can contemplate them without wishing they had been conquered. They are far in the rear of every other part of the English realm in all the comforts and conveniences of life, as well as in mental and physical development. Neither law nor learning descends to us from the mountains of Wales or from the Highlands of Scotland. The ancient Briton, whom Julius Caesar would not have as a slave, is not to be compared with the round, burly, amplitudinous Englishman in many of his qualities of desirable manhood.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

Life , World , Law , Mountain

“The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet; that it was written in their Koran; that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners; that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners; and that every Mussulman who was slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise. He said, also, that the man who was the first to board a vessel had one slave over and above his share, and that when they sprang to the deck of an enemy's ship, every sailor held a dagger in each hand and a third in his mouth; which usually struck such terror into the foe that they cried out for quarter at once. That it was a law that the first who boarded an Enemy’s Vessell should have one slave.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

Concerning an interview in London with the ambassador from Tripoli, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja.
1780s, Letter to John Jay (1786)

War , Law

“It would grant me much relief to learn your sons were engaged matrimonially to other white men if I was previously faced with the spectre of those same sons wedding negro women, slave or free, and siring negro sons that could presume to claim inheritance of your namesakes and property, or worse, equality with your purer grandchildren.”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

1860, Senate debate on legal status of interracial relationships.
1860s

Women , Men , Wedding , Learning

“The slaves of power mind the cause they have to serve, because their own interest is concerned; but the friends of liberty always sacrifice their cause, which is only the cause of humanity, to their own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

Review of Lord Byron's Childe Harold in Yellow Dwarf (2 May 1818), reprinted in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, ed. A.R. Waller and Arnold Glover (1902-1904)

“How could a person forget about the plains, the meadows, watered with the blood of our forefathers; abandon those places where Turkish raiders had hidden their steeds for a full four hundred years, with our mosques, our tombs, our dervish retreats, our bridges and our castles, to leave them to our slaves, to be driven out of Rumelia to Anatolia: this was beyond a person’s endurance. I am prepared to gladly sacrifice the remaining years of my life to take revenge on the Bulgarians, the Greeks, and the Montenegrans.”

İsmail Enver (1881–1922) Turkish military officer and a leader of the Young Turk revolution

Quoted in "A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility" - by Taner Akcam - History - 2007 - Page 115.

Life , Revenge , Water , Personality

“Lincoln asked the nation to confront unblinkingly the legacy of slavery. What were the requirements of justice in the face of this reality? What would be necessary to enable former slaves and their descendants to enjoy fully the pursuit of happiness? Lincoln did not live to provide an answer. A century and a half later, we have yet to do so.”

Eric Foner (1943) American historian

"The Emancipation of Abe Lincoln" http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/opinion/the-emancipation-of-abe-lincoln.html?ref=opinion&_r=0 (1 January 2013), The New York Times, New York
2010s

Justice , Reality , Happiness

“Much was made by abolitionists that the King James version of the Bible didn't use the word slaves, but, instead, servants. This meant, in their minds, that God didn't really approve of slavery. But that argument was linguistic at best. Slavery was codified and even sanctified in the tenth commandment, throwing slaves (and wives) in with other property belonging to one's neighbor that one must not covet. The Bible even regulated--as opposed to banning outright--the killing of slaves, stating that if a slave were beaten to death, the slave owner should be punished (though not killed himself, as would be his fate were he to kill a freeman), but if the slave didn't die until a day or two after the beating, the slave owner "shall not be punished, for he [the slave] is his money."”

Derrick Jensen book The Culture of Make Believe

Source: The Culture of Make Believe (2003), p. 56

Death , Money , God , Fate

“More important than these two considerations was the fact that Russia was at no time concerned with the two policies ‑ the forcing of opium on China and the trade in human flesh ‑ which both the people and Government of China resented and which brought her untold humiliation. … In the `pig trade' ‑ that is, the forcible transportation of Chinese workers to plantations and mines again, in defiance of the orders of Government and of the protests of the people ‑ in this new slave trade, where sometimes forty per cent of those transported died on the way, all Western Powers including America were deeply involved. Russia, for whatever reason, was no party to it. It was these two, the `poison trade' and the `pig trade', that made the iron enter the soul of the Chinese and made them bitterly anti‑foreign.”

K. M. Panikkar (1895–1963) Indian diplomat, academic and historian

Asia and Western Dominance: a survey of the Vasco Da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498–1945

People , Way , Soul , Time

“Donald Trump is right. We are at war and our homeland security and immigration policies are a complete mess. The Syrian refugee issue and the Islamic terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino have kick-started a much needed debate and have brought some alarming information to the American people. It starts with basic government incompetence and the suffocating PC culture that Republican and Democrat establishment leaders are slaves to along with the liberal media.”

David Bossie (1965) American political activist

Conservatives Should Think Bigger On Immigration Ban http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/12/11/conservatives-should-think-bigger-on-immigration-ban/ (December 11, 2015)

War , People

“We can see quite plainly that our present civilisation is built on the exploitation of animals, just as past civilisations were built on the exploitation of slaves, and we believe the spiritual destiny of man is such that in time he will view with abhorrence the idea that men once fed on the products of animals' bodies.”

Donald Watson (1910–2005) English vegan activist

Inaugural newsletter of the Vegan Society, Vegan News no. 1 (November 1944). Quoted in The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies, edited by Linda Kalof (Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 30 https://books.google.it/books?id=Cdv_DQAAQBAJ&pg=PA30.

Men , Idea , Time , Past

“The North Korean state is essentially two things: 1) a large money-laundering concern; 2) the world’s largest prison and slave labor camp. Now, however, it is a large money-laundering concern and prison camp that has additionally extorted its way to nuclear weapons. Any U. S. policy should begin and end with the knowledge of what North Korea really is. It is not a state engaged in the normal give-and-take of diplomacy, seeking "security assurances" in return for "denuclearization" or some other such deal conjured up by diplomats whose experience is in dealing with real countries who negotiate in good faith. Rather, North Korea has had a pretty good run with its current approach of extortion, criminality and the deprivation of its own people.”

Sung-Yoon Lee Korea and East Asia scholar, professor

http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/02/11/all_you_need_to_know_about_north_korea
North Korea is a nuclear criminal enterprise
Daniel Blumenthal
February 12, 2013
Foreign Policy
USA
February 13, 2013
http://web.archive.org/web/20130708033612/http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/02/11/all_you_need_to_know_about_north_korea
July 8, 2013
no

Money , People , World , Faith

“The Negro moved from an especially harsh slavery, which included cannibalism, to a milder form. Much is said about the horrors of the slave ships, many of which were very bad, but it is important to remember that slaves were valuable cargo and hence property normally handled with consideration.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Source: Writings, Politics of Guilt and Pity (1978), p. 25

“Is it desired to call attention to this fact? Proclaim it upon the house-tops! Write it upon every leaf that trembles in the forest! Make it blaze from the sun at high noon and shine forth in the radiance of every star that bedecks the firmament of God. Let it echo through all the arches of heaven, and reverberate and bellow through all the deep gorges of hell, where slave catchers will be very likely to hear it. Owen Lovejoy lives at Princeton, Illinois, three-quarters of a mile east of the village, and he aids every fugitive that comes to his door and asks it. Thou invisible demon of slavery! Dost thou think to cross my humble threshold, and forbid me to give bread to the hungry and shelter to the houseless? I bid you defiance in the name of my God.”

Owen Lovejoy (1811–1864) American politician

As quoted in His Brother's Blood: Speeches and Writings, 1838–64 https://books.google.com/books?id=qMEv8DNXVbIC&pg=PA178 (2004), edited by William Frederick Moore and Jane Ann Moore, p. 178
Also quoted in The History of Abraham Lincoln, and the Overthrow of Slavery http://books.google.com/books?id=RW0FAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA225, by Isaac Newton Arnold
Also quoted as Yes, I do assist fugitive slaves to escape! Proclaim it upon the house-tops; write it upon every leaf that trembles in the forest; make it blaze from the sun at high noon, and shine forth in the radiance of every star that bedecks the firmament of God. Let it echo through all the arches of heaven, and reverberate and bellow through all the deep gorges of hell, where slave catchers will be very likely to hear it. Owen Lovejoy lives at Princeton, Illinois, and he aids every fugitive that comes to his door and asks it. Thou invisible demon of slavery! Dost thou think to cross my humble threshold, and forbid me to give bread to the hungry and shelter to the houseless? I bid you defiance in the name of God.
1850s, The Fanaticism of the Democratic Party (February 1859)

God , Star , Hell , Thinking

“Janaki was one of the daughters of King Dahir of Sindh. She was captured along with her sister and sent to the Khalifa at Baghdad. When the Khalifa invited Janaki to share his bed, she lied to him that she had already been violated by Muhammad bin Qasim. Her sister supported her statement. The Khalifa ordered that Muhammad be sewed up in raw hide and sent to his court. Muhammad was already dead when the chest containing him arrived in Baghdad. Janaki accused the Khalifa of having killed one of his great generals without making proper enquiry. She said, 'The king has committed a very grievous mistake, for he ought not, on account of two slave girls, to have destroyed a person who had taken captive a hundred thousand modest women like us,… and who instead of temples had erected mosques, pulpits and minarets.”

Muhammad bin Qasim (695–715) Umayyad general

Elliot and Dowson, Vol. I : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. p. 211
Quotes from The Chach Nama

Women , Girl , Support , Sister

“The Constitution forbids the passing of a bill of attainder: that is, a law entailing upon the child the disabilities and hardships imposed upon the parent. Every slave law in America might be repealed on this very ground. The slave is made a slave because his mother is a slave. But to all this it is said that the practice of the American people is against my view. I admit it. They have given the Constitution a slaveholding interpretation. I admit it. Thy have committed innumerable wrongs against the Negro in the name of the Constitution. Yes, I admit it all; and I go with him who goes farthest in denouncing these wrongs. But it does not follow that the Constitution is in favor of these wrongs because the slaveholders have given it that interpretation. To be consistent in his logic, the City Hall speaker must follow the example of some of his brothers in America — he must not only fling away the Constitution, but the Bible. The Bible must follow the Constitution, for that, too, has been interpreted for slavery by American divines. Nay, more, he must not stop with the Constitution of America, but make war with the British Constitution, for, if I mistake not, the gentleman is opposed to the union of Church and State. In America he called himself a Republican. Yet he does not go for breaking down the British Constitution, although you have a Queen on the throne, and bishops in the House of Lords.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery? (1860)

War , People , Law , Parent

“Into whatever houses I enter, I will go into them for the benefit of the sick, and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption; and, further from the seduction of females or males, of freemen and slaves.”

Hippocrates (-460–-370 BC) ancient Greek physician

Oath of Hippocrates (c. 400 BC)

Housing

“When had a slave religion proved anything but an aid to the conqueror? Slaves needed a wailing wall; they went into their temples, prayed to their gods to deliver them from oppression, and came out to work in the fields and factories, relaxed and made harmless by the emotional catharsis of prayer.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Sixth Column

Source: Sixth Column (1949; originally serialized in 1941), Chapter 9 (p. 108)

God , Religion

“It is my opinion, that this kingdom has no right to lay a tax upon the colonies. At the same time I assert the authority of this kingdom over the colonies to be sovereign and supreme in every circumstance of Government and legislation whatsoever. The colonists are the subjects of this kingdom, equally entitled with yourselves to all the natural rights of mankind and the peculiar privileges of Englishmen… The Americans are the sons, not the bastards, of England. Taxation is no part of the governing or legislative power… When, therefore, in this House we give and grant, we give and grant what is our own. But in an American tax, what do we do? We, your Majesty's Commons for Great Britain, give and grant to your Majesty,— what? Our own property?— No! We give and grant to your Majesty, the property of your Majesty's Commons of America… The distinction between legislation and taxation is essentially necessary to liberty… There is an idea in some, that the colonies are virtually represented in this House… Is he represented by any knight of the shire, in any county in this kingdom?… Or will you tell him that he is represented by any representative of a borough?— a borough which perhaps its own representatives never saw.— This is what is called the rotten part of the constitution. It cannot continue a century. If it does not drop, it must be amputated… I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people so dead to all the feelings of liberty, as voluntarily to let themselves be made slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of all the rest… The gentleman asks, When were the colonies emancipated? I desire to know when were they made slaves?”

William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham (1708–1778) British politician

Speech in the House of Commons on the Stamp Act (14 January 1766), quoted in William Pitt, The Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons: With a Biographical Memoir and Introductions and Explanatory Notes to the Speeches (London: Aylott & Jones, 1848), pp. 71-6.

People , Feeling , Idea , Nature

“Speak, speak, let terror strike slaves mute,
Much danger makes great hearts most resolute.”

John Marston The Wonder of Women

The Wonder of Women, or The Tragedy of Sophonisba, Act II, sc. ii. (1606)

Heart

“Bear with me, fellow-citizens, while I urge still another consideration. By the Constitution, only three fifths of the slaves were counted in forming the basis of Congressional representation. The Proclamation of Emancipation adds the other two fifths, which at the next census will be more than two millions. If the negro be denied the franchise, and the size of the House of Representatives remain as now, we shall have fifteen additional members of Congress from the States lately in rebellion, without the addition of a single citizen to their population, and we shall have fifteen less in the loyal States. This will not only give six members of Congress to South Carolina, four sevenths of whose people are negroes, but it will place the power of the State, as well as the destiny of 412,000 black men, in the hands of the 20,000 white men, less than the number of voters in our own Congressional district, who, under the restricted suffrage of that undemocratic State, exercise the franchise. Such an unjust and unequal distribution of power would breed perpetual mischief. The evils of the rotten borough system of England would be upon us.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1860s, Oration at Ravenna, Ohio (1865)

Men , People , Exercises , Evil

“In the management of slave labor the gang system predominated. The great majority of owners, having at the most only one or two families of Negroes, had to work alongside their slaves and set the pace for them. Slavery did not make white labor unrespectable, but merely inefficient. The slave had a deliberateness of motion which no amount of supervision could quicken. If the owner got ahead of the gang they all would shirk behind his back.”

W. Cleon Skousen (1913–2006) ex FBI agent, conservative United States author and faith-based political theorist

The Making of America (1986)

Family

“When Britain first, at Heaven's command,
Arose from out the azure main,
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sung this strain:
'Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.”

James Thomson (poet) (1700–1748) Scottish writer (1700-1748)

Alfred, Act II, sc. v (1740).

Angels

“Russia was a slave in Europe but would be a master in Asia.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) Russian author

As quoted in "Dilemmas of Empire 1850-1918: Power, Territory, Identity" by Dominic Livien in Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 34, No.2 (April 1999), pp. 180

“the society which projects and undertakes the technological transformation of nature alters the base of domination by gradually replacing personal dependence (of the slave on the master, the serf on the lord of the manor, the lord on the donor of the fief, etc.) with dependence on the “objective order of things””

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

on economic laws, the market etc.
Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 144

Law , Nature , Dependency , Personality

“[…] Pao-yu was given even more freedom than before. He spent most of his time playing the willing slave to the young ladies and his favored maids. Occasionally Pervading Fragrance or Precious Virtue would remonstrate with him and advise him to give some thought to his studies and his future career, but such advice only irritated him and brought the retort that he was surprised to see in them the same worldliness that he only associated with the more vulgar sex. Black Jade, alone, never gave him occasion for such remarks.”

Wang Chi-chen (1899–2001)

Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (1958), p. 182

Sex , Study , Freedom , Time

“To those privileged ones -- among whom we count ourselves -- the high-resounding "isms" to which their contemporaries ask them to give their allegiance are all equally futile: bound to be betrayed, defeated, and finally rejected by men at large, if containing anything really noble; bound to enjoy, for the time being, some sort of noisy success, if sufficiently vulgar, pretentious, and soul-killing to appeal to the growing number of mechanically conditioned slaves that crawl about our planet, posing as free men; all destined to prove, ultimately, of no avail.”

Savitri Devi book The Lightning and the Sun

The Lightning and the Sun (Calcutta: Temple Press, 1958, p. 3, http://www.vaidilute.com/books/savitri/savitri-01.html)

Men , Soul , Time , Success

“Happy white peoples independence day the slaves weren't free but I'm sure they enjoyed fireworks”

Chris Rock (1965) American comedian, actor, screenwriter, television producer, film producer, and director

https://twitter.com/chrisrock/status/220512157937315842
Twitter
2012-07-04, quoted in Chris Rock Lights Up Controversy With Fourth of July Tweet, 2012-07-06, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/entertainment/2012/07/chris-rock-fires-up-controversy-with-fourth-of-july-tweet/,
Miscellaneous

People , Happiness

“Next morning the sun revealed a horrid spectacle on the vast plain south of PAnipat. On the actual field of the combat thirty-one distinct heaps of the slain were counted, the number of bodies in each ranging from 500 upwards to 1000 and in four up to 1500 a rough total of 28,000. In addition to these, the ditch round the Maratha camp was full of dead bodies, partly the victims of disease and famine during the long siege and partly wounded men who had crawled out of the fighting to die there. West and south of PAnipat city, the jungle and the road in the line of MarAtha retreat were littered with the remains of those who had fallen unresisting in the relentless DurrAni pursuit or from hunger and exhaustion. Their number - probably three-fourths non-combatants and one-fourth soldiers - could not have been far short of the vast total of those slain in the battlefield. 'The hundreds who lay down wounded, perished from the severity of the cold.'….
'After the havoc of combat followed massacre in cold blood. Several hundreds of MarAthas had hidden themselves in the hostile city of PAnipat through folly or helplessness; and these were hunted out next day and put to the sword. According to one plausible account, the sons of Abdus Samad Khan and Mian Qutb received the DurrAni king's permission to avenge their father's death by an indiscriminate massacre of the MarAthas for one day, and in this way nearly nine thousand men perished; these were evidently non-combatants. The eyewitness Kashiraj Pandit thus describes the scene: 'Every Durrani soldier brought away a hundred or two of prisoners and slew them in the outskirts of their camp, crying out, When I started from our country, my mother, father, sister and wife told me to slay so may kafirs for their sake after we had gained the victory in this holy war, so that the religious merit of this act [of infidel slaying] might accrue to them. In this way, thousands of soldiers and other persons were massacred. In the Shah's camp, except the quarters of himself and his nobles, every tent had a heap of severed heads before it. One may say that it was verily doomsday for the MarAtha people.'….
The booty captured within the entrenchment was beyond calculation and the regiments of Khans [i. e. 8000 troopers of AbdAli clansmen] did not, as far as possible, allow other troops like the IrAnis and the TurAnis to share in the plunder; they took possession of everything themselves, but sold to the Indian soldiers handsome Brahman women for one tuman and good horses for two tumans each.' The Deccani prisoners, male and female reduced to slavery by the victorious army numbered 22,000, many of them being the sons and other relatives of the sardArs or middle class men. Among them 'rose-limbed slave girls' are mentioned.' Besides these 22,000 unhappy captives, some four hundred officers and 6000 men fled for refuge to ShujA-ud-daulah's camp, and were sent back to the Deccan with monetary help by that nawab, at the request of his Hindu officers. The total loss of the MarAthas after the battle is put at 50,000 horses, captured either by the AfghAn army or the villagers along the route of flight, two hundred thousand draught cattle, some thousands of camels, five hundred elephants, besides cash and jewellery. 'Every trooper of the Shah brought away ten, and sometimes twenty camels laden with money. The captured horses were beyond count but none of them was of value; they came like droves of sheep in their thousands.”

Ahmed Shah Durrani (1722–1772) founder of the Durrani Empire, considered founder of the state of Afghanistan

Jadunath Sarkar, Fall of the Mughal Empire, Volume II, Fourth Edition, New Delhi, 1991, p.210-11

Death , Women , Men , Money

“Gentlemen, you may soon have the alternative to live as slaves or die as free men”

Daniel O'Connell (1775–1847) Irish political leader

from his speech in Mallow, County Cork

Men

“I have spent the greater part of my life in immediate contemplation of the most grotesque and horrible of the English innovations for the debasement of Ireland. I mean their education system. The English once proposed in their Dublin Parliament a measure for the castration of all Irish priests who refused to quit Ireland. The proposal was so filthy than although it duly passed the House and was transmitted to England with the warm recommendation at the Viceroy. it was not eventually adopted. But the English have actually carried out an even filthier thing. They have planned and established an education system which more wickedly does violence to the elemental human rights of Irish children than would an edict for the general castration of Irish males. The system has aimed at the substitution for men and women of mere Things. It has not been an entire success. There are still a great many thousand men and women in Ireland. But a great many thousand of what, by way of courtesy, we call men and women, are simply Things. Men and women. however depraved, have kindly human allegiances. But these Things have no allegiance. Like other Things. they are For sale. When one uses the term education system as the name of the system of schools. colleges, universities, and whatnot which the English have established in Ireland, one uses it as a convenient label, just as one uses the term government as a convenient label for the system of administration by police which obtains in Ireland instead of a government. There is no education system in Ireland. The English have established the simulacrum of an education system, but its object is the precise contrary of the object of an education system. Education should foster; this education is meant to repress. Education should inspire; this education is meant to tame. Education should harden; this education is meant to enervate. The English are too wise a people to attempt to educate the Irish in any worthy sense. As well expect them to arm us. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eoin_MacNeill Professor Eoin MacNeill] has compared the English education system in Ireland to the systems of slave education which existed in the ancient pagan republics side by side with the systems intended for the education of freemen. To the children of the free were taught all noble and goodly things which would tend to make them strong and proud and valiant; from the children of the slaves all such dangerous knowledge was hidden.”

Patrick Pearse (1879–1916) Irish revolutionary, shot by the British Army in 1916

The Murder Machine

Life , Women , Men , Children

“In like manner the Reverend Dr. William A. Smith, President of the Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, in his work upon the Philosophy and Practice of Slavery, deliberately repudiates Mr. Jefferson's view of slavery as a 'grossly offensive error', and attributes the anti-slavery movement to him – which is as wise as to attribute the motion of the earth to Galileo. Judge Wayne, in his late charge at Savannah upon the law against the slave-trade, confirms Mr. Stephens's statement. And, as if to establish it by the most unexpected testimony, Mr. Edward Everett, in his late discourse upon Daniel Webster, said, 'In common with all, or nearly all, the statesmen of the last generation, he believed that free labor would ultimately prevail throughout the continent.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Law , Error

“Numbin' the runt of reputation they call rat frame,
Top-E as a tourniquet,
A low tune whistles across his grave,
Forever the slave of his Six Strings.”

Nick Cave (1957) Australian musician

Song lyrics, The Firstborn Is Dead (1985), The Six Strings That Drew Blood

“The organization of federal units of black soldiers, comprised of both escaped slaves and free men, was taken as an outrage. It struck a raw nerve, never far off in the southern psyche. Fear of a slave insurrection. The prospect of African American men in blue uniforms was taken as an extreme provocation, so much so that it was proposed in the Confederate congress, and endorsed by General Beauregard, the hero of Fort Sumter, that all Federals captured, black or white, should be summarily executed. This proposal was never adopted, but the Confederate congress did eventually pass, in May 1863, a proclamation instructing President Jefferson Davis to exercise 'full and ample retaliation' against the north for arming black soldiers. Finally, there was simple revenge. The Union army's shelling of Fredericksburg several months before had been a particular sore point, that festered for months as the Confederate army went into winter quarters nearby. One officer, determined to fix the destruction there in his mind's eye, made a special visit to that town one last time before setting out on the road north into Maryland and Pennsylvania.”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

Andy Hall, "We have received provocation enough..." http://deadconfederates.com/2013/07/01/we-have-received-provocation-enough/ (1 July 2013), Dead Confederates: A Civil War Era Blog.

Men , Fear , Exercises , Revenge

“The three States of Georgia, Florida and South Carolina, comprising the military department of the south, having deliberately declared themselves no longer under the protection of the United States of America, and having taken up arms against the said United States, it becomes a military necessity to declare them under martial law. This was accordingly done on the 25th day of April, 1862. Slavery and martial law in a free country are altogether incompatible; the persons in these three States — Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina— heretofore held as slaves, are therefore declared forever free.”

David Hunter (1802–1886) Union Army general

1860s, General Order No. 11 (May 1862)

Law , Personality , Country

“Christianity is most admirably adapted to the training of slaves, to the perpetuation of a slave society; in short, to the very conditions confronting us to-day…. The rulers of the earth have realized long ago what potent poison inheres in the Christian religion. That is the reason they foster it; that is why they leave nothing undone to instill it into the blood of the people. They know only too well that the subtleness of the Christian teachings is a more powerful protection against rebellion and discontent than the club or the gun.”

Emma Goldman (1868–1940) anarchist known for her political activism, writing, and speeches

The Failure of Christianity (1913)

People , Religion , Training

“The emergence of new media (and therefore artistic) formats is certainly interesting. But etching information into copper plates is just as exciting. We think that the perpetual return of 'the new', to cite Walter Benjamin, is nothing to write home about - except perhaps for the slave-drivers in the fashion industry. We've never been interested in the new just in itself, but in the accidental occurrence. In the moment where things don't tally, where productive confusion arises. That's why in the final analysis, although we've laughed a lot with Stewart Home, we even reject the meta-criticism of innovation-fixation articulated in 'neoism.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

The new sorts itself out when it lands in the museum. Finito.
Interview on Furtherfield http://www.furtherfield.org/features/interviews/interview-johannes-grenzfurthner-monochrom-part-3

Home , Fashion , Thinking

“The great crisis facing the country was the rebellion and anybody in the North who wanted to preserve the Union now found the principal enemy to be those Southern slave owners who had broken up the country. The institution which sustained them and the institution they went to war to defend was slavery. And more and more northerners became convinced of that. As a consequence, a lot of them went the whole way over, from being conservative, pro-Southern, pro-slavery Democrats to becoming radical Republicans. Benjamin Butler is a good example, and Edwin M. Stanton is another one.”

James M. McPherson (1936) American historian

1990s, An Exchange With a Civil War Historian (June 1995)

War , Way , Country

“The worst of men is he who stops his contributions to charity, eats by himself, and whips his slave.”

Ali al-Rida (770–818) eighth of the Twelve Imams

Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol.78, p. 335.
Religious Wisdom

Men

“In conformity with the recommendation of Congress, a proposition was early made to the British Government to abolish the mixed courts created under the treaty of April 7, 1862, for the suppression of the slave trade. The subject is still under negotiation.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

1860s, First State of the Union Address (1869)

“No, liberty is not made for us: we are too ignorant, too vain, too presumptuous, too cowardly, too vile, too corrupt, too attached to rest and to pleasure, too much slaves to fortune to ever know the true price of liberty. We boast of being free! To show how much we have become slaves, it is enough just to cast a glance on the capital and examine the morals of its inhabitants.”

Jean-Paul Marat (1743–1793) politician and journalist during the French Revolution

L'Ami du peuple, no.559 (1791-08-27)

Pleasure

“The tendency of the families of wealth in every country to form a class by themselves, is deep-set in the human makeup. Rome carried the tendency one step further — she cemented the moneyed class in the various countries into an international combine. "Peace and order" were at last secure. An antitoxin against insomnia had been devised. Slave owners could now lay their heads on their pillows at night, without the fear of insurrection gnawing them through the night-watches. An uprising of the toiling masses, no matter how formidable, could be handled. Upon a rebellious district could be mobilized in shortest time six and twenty legions. The machinery of intimidation was complete. Man was undermost, and property paramount. The "Golden Age" — literally — set in. The Roman Empire, that apotheosis of property rights, fastened itself upon the world. Embracing all nations and tongues and climates, a motley crew, they had one cohering principle which swallowed up their diversities — the coherence of a common plunder.”

Bouck White (1874–1951) American author and novelist

Source: The Call of the Carpenter (1914), pp. 15-16

Money , Age , World , Fear

“As long as Fortune wanted me
to keep on hoping for happiness
I took pleasure in amorous thoughts
and wrote down how they made me feel.
But Love, afraid that what I write
might serve free hearts as a warning,
clouded my inspiration with torment
to keep his deceits from coming to light.
O you whom Love has made the slaves
of various passions! When you read
in one small book such varied cases
know that they're pure truths, not tales,
and that your own experience in love
will lead you through my verses' meaning.”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

Richard Zenith, Sonnets and Other Poems (2009)
Lyric poetry, Sonnets, Enquanto quis Fortuna que tivesse

Love , Pleasure , Truth , Books

“We, aided by the Socialists, will try to make it understood by others. Philosophy cannot justify the relation between the free laborer and the idle, irresponsible employer. But ‘tis easy to justify that between master and slave. Their obligations are mutual and equal, and if the master will superintend and provide for the slave in sickness, in health, infancy, and old age—if he will feed and clothe him properly, guard his morals, and treat him kindly and humanely.”

George Fitzhugh (1806–1881) American activist

Source: Cannibals All!, or Slaves Without Masters (1857), pp. 125-126

Health , Age , Clothes

“Icelanders! You are the descendants of Nordic vikings! Down with Irish slaves!”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

The True Icelanders of Sviðinsvík
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Three: The House of the Poet

“He, who will not reason, is a bigot; he, who cannot, is a fool; and he, who dares not, is a slave.”

William Drummond of Logiealmond (1770–1828) Scottish diplomat and Member of Parliament, poet and philosopher

in Academical Questions (1805), Preface, p. 15 http://books.google.com/books?id=U9FOAAAAYAAJ&pg=PR15

Fools

“In February 1860 Jeff Davis offered a bill in the Senate wh. passed, making all the territories slave territory. See Davis' book. He was opposed to letting the people decide whether or not they would have slavery – Wm. A. Smith, President of Randolph Macon quit his duties as a teacher and in 1857-8-9-60 traveled all over Virginia preaching slavery and proving it was right by the bible.”

John S. Mosby (1833–1916) Confederate Army officer

Letter to Samuel "Sam" Chapman (June 1907)

People , Books , Travel , Teachers

“To prevent Incitatus, his favourite horse, from being disturbed he always picketed the neighbourhood with troops on the day before the races, ordering them to enforce absolute silence. Incitatus owned a marble stable, an ivory stall, purple blankets, and a jewelled collar; also a house, a team of slaves, and furniture – to provide suitable entertainment for guests whom Gaius invited in its name. It is said that he even planned to award Incitatus a consulship.”
Incitato equo, cuius causa pridie circenses, ne inquietaretur, viciniae silentium per milites indicere solebat, praeter equile marmoreum et praesaepe eburneum praeterque purpurea tegumenta ac monilia e gemmis domum etiam et familiam et supellectilem dedit, quo lautius nomine eius invitati acciperentur; consulatum quoque traditur destinasse.

Sueton book The Twelve Caesars

Source: The Twelve Caesars, Gaius Caligula, Ch. 55

Silence , Horse , Housing

“I still think, notwithstanding, that under all the disadvantages of slave cultivation, much improvement in it is practicable. Proofs are annually taking place within my own sphere of observation; particularly where slaves are held in small numbers, by good masters and managers. As to the very wealthy proprietors, much less is to be said. But after all, protesting against any inference of a disposition to undertake the evil of slavery, is it certain that in giving to your wealth a new investment, you would be altogether freed from the cares and vexations incident to the shape it now has? If converted into paper, you already feel some of the contingencies belonging to it; if into commercial stock, look at the wrecks every where giving warning of the danger. If into large landed property, where there are no slaves, will you cultivate it yourself? Then beware of the difficulty of procuring faithful or complying labourers. Will you dispose of it in leases? Ask those who have made the experiment what sort of tenants are to be found where an ownership of the soil is so attainable.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

1820s, Letter to F. Corbin (1820)

Faith , Feeling , Thinking , Evil

“Ibn Battutah while in Bengal says that a pretty kaniz (slave girl) could be had there for one gold dinar (or 10 silver tankahs). "I purchased at this price a very beautiful slave girl whose name was Ashura. A friend of mine also bought a young slave named Lulu for two gold coins."”

Ibn Battuta (1304–1377) Moroccan explorer

Quoted from Lal, K. S. (1999). Theory and practice of Muslim state in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 4
Travels in Asia and Africa (Rehalã of Ibn Battûta)

Beauty , Girl

“When America passed the fugitive slave law compelling men to catch their fellows more brutally than runaway dogs, Canada, aristocratic, unrepublican Canada, still stretched her arms to those who might reach her. But there is no refuge upon earth for the enslaved sex. Right where we are, there we must dig our trenches, and win or die.”

Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) American anarchist writer and feminist

Sex Slavery (1890)

Men , Law , Dogs , Sex

“The Greeks, who were apparently strong on visual aids, originated the term stigma to refer to bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier. The signs were cut or burnt into the body and advertised that the bearer was a slave, a criminal, or a traitor — a blemished person, ritually polluted, to be avoided, especially in public places. Later, in Christian times, two layers of metaphor were added to the term : the first referred to bodily signs of holy grace that took the form of eruptive blossoms on the skin; the second, a medical allusion to this religious allusion, referred to bodily signs of physical disorder. Today the term is widely used in something like the original literal sense, but is applied more to the disgrace itself than to the bodily evidence of it. Furthermore, shifts have occurred in the kinds of disgrace that arouse concern. Students, however, have made little effort to describe the structural preconditions of stigma, or even to provide a definition of the concept itself. It seems necessary, therefore, to try at the beginning to sketch in some very general assumptions and definitions.”

Erving Goffman book Stigma

Source: 1950s-1960s, Stigma, 1963, p. 1-2 Lead paragraph

Sense , Effort , Strong , Time

“he took a few, the tribe of Abraham. He established a perfect despotism—with no schools, with no philosophy, with no art, with no music—nothing but the sacrifices of dumb beasts—nothing but the abject worship of a slave. Not a word upon geology, upon astronomy; nothing, even, upon the science of medicine. Thus God spent hours and hours with Moses upon the top of Sinai, giving directions for ascertaining the presence of leprosy and for preventing its spread, but it never occurred to Jehovah to tell Moses how it could be cured. He told them a few things about what they might eat—prohibiting among other things four-footed birds, and one thing upon the subject of cooking. From the thunders and lightnings of Sinai he proclaimed this vast and wonderful fact: “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk.””

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Some Reasons Why (1881)

God , School , Art , Music

“When human statecraft attaches a chain to the feet of a free man, whom it makes a slave in contempt of nature and citizenship, eternal justice rivets the other end about the tyrant's neck.”

Louis Antoine de Saint-Just (1767–1794) military and political leader

Fragment 3 (1794). [Source: Saint-Just, Fragments sur les institutions républicaines]

Justice , Nature

“Do you say that the people of the free state have nothing to do with it, and can do nothing? Would to God this were true! But it is not true. The people of the free states have defended, encouraged, and participated; and are more guilty for it, before God, than the South, in that they have not the apology of education or custom.
If the mothers of the free states had all felt as they should, in times past, the sons of the free states would not have been the holders, and, proverbially, the hardest masters of slaves; the sons of the free states would not have connived at the extension of slavery, in our national body; the sons of the free states would not, as they do, trade the souls and bodies of men as an equivalent to money, in their mercantile dealings. There are multitudes of slaves temporarily owned, and sold again, by merchants in northern cities; and shall the whole guilt or obloquy of slavery fall only on the South?
Northern men, northern mothers, northern Christians, have something more to do than denounce their brethren at the South; they have to look to the evil among themselves.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe book Uncle Tom's Cabin

Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Concluding Remarks

Men , Money , God , People

“The Republicans had fielded an army and navy of more than 2.5 million men, had invented national banking, currency, and taxation, had provided schools and homes for poor Americans, and had freed the country's four million slaves.”

Heather Cox Richardson American historian

To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party https://books.google.com/books?id=s-JzAgAAQBAJ&pg=PP2&dq=to+make+men+free+a+history&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCIQ6AEwAWoVChMIq97csor9xwIVRJkeCh3tvg7i#v=onepage&q=to%20make%20men%20free%20a%20history&f=false (2014), p. ix

Men , School , Home , Country

“The Republican Party was organized in 1854-55, upon the platform of liberty and independence, to maintain the union of the States and the rights of the States; freedom of speech and the press; to resist the spread of slavery and the aggressions of the slave power; the equal rights of all persona to impartial protection at home and abroad, and in the enjoyment of religious freedom; and of all American citizens, whether native or naturalized, to the free exercise of the elective franchise and the enjoyment of its benefits; and requiring no test for office except honesty, capacity, and devotion to American institutions.”

Elbridge G. Spaulding (1809–1897) American politician

Remarks on the Republican platform (1860)

Exercises , Home , Nature , Freedom

“[I]f you think you have the right to health care, you are saying basically that I am your slave. I provide health care. … My staff and technicians provide it. … If you have a right to health care, then you have a right to their labor.”

Rand Paul (1963) American politician, ophthalmologist, and United States Senator from Kentucky

Town hall meeting in Lexington, 2009-11
2000s

Health , Thinking

“…for nothing can be more reasonable, than that slaves and flatterers should exact the same taxes on all below them, which they themselves pay to all above them.”

Henry Fielding (1707–1754) English novelist and dramatist

Book I, Chapter 6
The History of Tom Jones (1749)

“I remember a rusher; not on a sports team. A rusher who carried an American flag, the regimental flag of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers. It is an attack on the Confederate fort known as Battery Wagner outside of Charleston, south Carolina, in July of 1863. 54th Massachusetts was an all black regiment, one of the first to be recruited after the Emancipation Proclamation. The attack was almost a suicide mission. the regiment swept up to the walls of the fort. penetrated briefly, only to be driven out with heavy losses. the rusher I am thinking of was the color sergeant of the regiment. his name was William H. Carney. He had been born a slave. He was now a free man and a soldier. He brought the stars and stripes off the ramparts of Fort Wagner, despite being wounded in the chest and leg, staggering back under fire to a field hospital, and there, just before he collapsed, he surrendered the flag into the hands of several others there saying, "The old flag never touched the ground, boys!" Before the first of January 1863 when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation into law, he didn't have a flag, he doesn't have a country. He was a slave; he was an unperson. But in July of 1863, he was a free man. As a free man, there was no symbol to him of greater value than that flag. So you understand that it is difficult for me to understand why people would insult it.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

"Free Speech and the First Amendment" https://www.c-span.org/video/?437511-1/free-speech-amendment&start=150 (20 November 2017), C-SPAN
2010s

People , Law , Color , Star

“Beautiful Healy Hall—part of, and all around where we sit now—was named after this great university’s 29th President, Patrick Francis Healy. Healy was born into slavery, in Georgia, in 1834. His father was an Irish immigrant plantation owner and his mother, a slave. Under the laws of that time, Healy and his siblings were considered to be slaves. Healy is believed to be the first African-American to earn a Ph. D., the first to enter the Jesuit order, and the first to be president of Georgetown University or any predominantly white university.”

James Comey (1960) American lawyer and the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)

Law , Beauty , Universe , Time

“When Reagan fired the striking air traffic controllers in 1981, he told America he was literally willing to kill us all if we didn't give in to his wealth-transfer plan. It was so shocking that it worked. The air controller's union broke- and so did a whole way of life. Thanks to Ronald Reagan, we are all miserable wage slaves, or schoolyard wretches being pressed and prepared for life in the office world. There is no other choice but that, or death. The way this country supplicated before Reagan's corpse, elevating him to a kind of Khomeini status with the seven-day funeral and the endless orations about his humanity, his intelligence, and how wonderfully simple life was under his reign, only reinforced the most disturbing conclusion that I was reaching as I wrote this book: that Americans have become the perfect slaves, fools and suckers, while a small elite is cackling all the way to the offshore bank.”

Mark Ames (1965) American writer and journalist

Postscript, p. 241-242
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)

Life , Death , Books , World

“So about 80 years after the Constitution is ratified, the slaves are freed. Not so you'd really notice it of course; just kinda on paper. And that of course was at the end of the Civil War. Now there is another phrase I dearly love. That is a true oxymoron if I've ever heard one — civil war. D'you think anybody in this country could ever really have a civil war? "Say, pardon me…*machinegun sounds*… I'm awfully sorry! Awfully sorry."
Now of course the Civil War has been over for about 120 years. But… not so you'd really notice it. Because you see we have these people called "Civil War buffs"… in fact some of these people actually get dressed up once a year and then go out and re-fight these battles. D'you know what I say to these people? USE LIVE AMMUNITION ASSHOLES, WOULD YA PLEASE?! You might just raise the intelligence level of the American gene pool!”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

What Am I Doing in New Jersey? (1988)

Love , War , People , Intelligence

“As a slave one cannot undertake obligations without the consent of one’s master. As a citizen one cannot undertake obligations unless the legal system of the State in which one holds citizenship permits one to do so. Neither a slave nor a citizen is a free person, although those who are held as slaves or citizens may well be free persons: it is just that their freedom is not respected.”

Frank Van Dun (1947) Belgian law philosopher

The Perfect Law of Freedom (2004).

Freedom , Personality

“We have heard popular orators declaiming to audiences to whose fathers James Otis and Samuel Adams spoke, and whose fathers' cheeks would have burned with shame and their hearts tingled with indignation to hear, that the Declaration of Independence was the passionate manifesto of a revolutionary war, and its doctrine of equal human rights a glittering generality. And finally, throwing off the mask altogether, but still whining to be let alone, we see this system, grown now from seven hundred thousand to four millions of slaves, declaring that it is in a peculiar sense a divine and Christian institution; that it is right in itself and a blessing, not a bane; that it is ineradicable in the soil; that it is directly recognized and protected by the Constitution of the United States; that its rights under that Constitution are to be maintained at all hazards; and haw they are maintained we may see in the slave States, by the absolute annihilation of free speech and by codes of law insulting to humanity and common-sense; and how they are to be maintained in the new States we have seen in the story of Kansas. It declares that, the Congress of the United States being a slave instrument and being also the supreme law of the land, the rights of the slave States are to be protected from injury by the suppression in the free States of what shall be decided by the United States Courts to be incendiary discussion; and at last it openly announces, by its representative leaders in Congress, that if a majority of the people of the United States shall elect a government holding what they allow to have been the principles of the founders of the government upon this question, they will hesitate at no steps to destroy the Union.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

War , People , Law , Question

“While slavery meant Egypt, and slavemasters meant Pharoah, America itself remained the promised land. The slaves knew that it was not in Africa, Europe, or anywhere else that a nation had been founded upon the self-evident truth that all men are created equal. It was their destiny to cross over jordan here, and to make their decisive contribution to the human story here, by partaking of that new birth of freedom that alone could vindicate the cause of all human beings everywhere.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

Source: 2000s, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000), p. 164

Men , Truth , Birth , Decision

“Unless one cultivates slave-master relationship with the Lord,
No one can go across the ocean of this material world.
Who is as virtuous a master as Rama?
And who is as vicious as I am?”

Tulsidas (1532–1623) Hindu poet-saint

Tulsidas quoted in "Hindu spirituality: Postclassical and modern", p. 77

World

“The Industrial Revolution, too, failed to introduce a reign of freedom and happiness: it converted the medieval serf into an industrial slave; replaced the feudal baron by the industrial mogul, created in its wake an ever-growing, ever-shifting class of declassés, who had neither pride of ancestry nor love of tradition… The age of machine and competition, of capital, class-struggle, and demagogy was upon man.”

Tobias Dantzig (1884–1956) American mathematician

Henri Poincaré, Critic of Crisis: Reflections on His Universe of Discourse (1954), Ch. 2. The Age of Innocence

Love , Age , Freedom , Happiness

“To whomever gives a kiss or a blow
Render a kiss or blow
But to whomever gives when you are unable to return
Offer all the hatred in your heart
For you were slaves and he enslaves you”

Jean Paul Sartre book The Devil and the Good Lord

À celui qui donne un baiser ou un coup
Rendez un baiser ou un coup
Mais à celui qui donne sans que vous puissiez rendre
Offrez toute la haine de votre coeur
Car vous étiez esclaves et il vous asservit
Acts 8 & 9
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)

Kiss , Heart

“I don't know whether Abraham Lincoln knew exactly what he was doing when he freed the slaves. Perhaps he did it only as a war measure. The war, you remember, dragged along without any heart in it. Nobody seemed to want to fight. There was everything to fight for- the Union, the preservation of a country whole- but the idea of union, even of country, did not seem enough to make men want to fight… There were even plenty of people, accustomed to the small compact nations of Europe, who thought that perhaps this great expanse of America should not be one country, that it might be better if it were divided into nations instead of states. But others were determined that the continual bickering and quarreling between the little nations of Europe should not be repeated here and they were determined to keep the country whole and large, and among these was Abraham Lincoln.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

Source: What America Means to Me (1943), p. 192

Men , War , People , Idea

“There’s a word the locals use for a backpacker: pachiça. It refers to those who carry their baggage or bundles on their heads. In the old days it applied to slaves – the dispossessed who were forced to make the long trek to the coast. Just then it seemed as though the old word had found a perfect match in these coast-bound, tourist slaves.
I realised too that I had been slave to the nostalgic dream of a pre-war Mozambique passed down as family lore. I had been a pachiça, carrying a pack of saudades handed down through grandparents, parents and siblings. Along the way I’d shed much of the baggage and forged my own relationship with the place, bred a new set of experiences to feed my progeny, or those who cared to listen.”

Justin D. Fox (1967) South African author, photojournalist, lecturer and editor

With Both Hands Waving: A Journey Through Mozambique (2001)

War , Family , Dreams , Way

“Had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment. This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to "remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them." I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say, I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done!”

John Brown (abolitionist) (1800–1859) American abolitionist

Provisional Constitution and Ordinances (1858), Speech to the Court (1859)

Life , Men , God , Children

“Technical people don't make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.”

Vernor Vinge book A Deepness in the Sky

A Deepness in the Sky (1999)

People

“As a moral guide, [the Bible] utterly fails, because much of the original Hebrew scriptures were written by ignorant and bigoted savages who condoned and promoted animal cruelty, incest, slavery, abuse of slaves, spousal abuse, child abuse, child molestation, abortion, pillage, murder, cannibalism, genocide, and prejudice against race, nationality, religion, sex, and sexual orientation.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"2nd Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFrkjEgUDZA&list=PL126AFB53A6F002CC&index=2, Youtube (November 24, 2007)
Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Religion , Sex , Animals

“A numinous experience lacking further significance quickly degenerates into mere superstition, easily rationalized or forgotten over time. What prevented this particular experience from such a fate was its connection with something of urgent significance to this diverse group of escaped slaves: a covenant. The covenant revealed at Mount Sinai directly addressed their wilderness predicament by proposing a framework on which this heterogeneous collection of individuals could see beyond their differences and together build a future, no longer as a “mixed rabble” but as “one people.” The thunderstorm at the mountain powerfully reinforced the sacred quality and value of the covenant delivered there by Moses, and the value of this covenant, in turn, powerfully reinforced the escaped slaves’ belief that, in this particular thunderstorm, they had indeed witnessed the presence and voice of a god.In antiquity, the revelation of a new religious insight or system was not described in terms of human inspiration or innovation but rather as a divine revelation associated with a theophany. The theophany was the typical motif used to explain the origin of something new and meaningful. But something new can only become meaningful if it is also expressed and described in terms and analogies that are already well-known to everyone concerned. Despite its religious novelty, the Sinai covenant Moses delivered was readily intelligible to these ex-slaves because it employed well-known concepts and images, in this case concepts and images drawn from the familiar world of Late Bronze Age international politics. Naturally, they were adapted so that they now served religious as opposed to political ends, providing a basis for a community whose cohesion did not require any political enforcement mechanism or monopoly of force.”

George E. Mendenhall (1916–2016) American academic

Ancient Israel’s Faith and History: An Introduction the Bible in Context (2001)

Fate , People , Age , World

“[Pao-yu] could not see why beautiful maidens should marry and become slaves of men who would take them for granted, when they could just as well remain carefree and do nothing but play games and write verses.”

Wang Chi-chen (1899–2001)

Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (1958), p. 272

Men , Beauty , Game

“The economic needs of a violently centralizing society forced the empire to enlarge its slave-system until the slave-system consumed itself and the empire too, leaving society no resource but further enlargement of its religious system in order to compensate for the losses and horrors of the failure.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
Context: p>The result might have been stated in a mathematical formula as early as the time of Archimedes, six hundred years before Rome fell. The economic needs of a violently centralizing society forced the empire to enlarge its slave-system until the slave-system consumed itself and the empire too, leaving society no resource but further enlargement of its religious system in order to compensate for the losses and horrors of the failure. For a vicious circle, its mathematical completeness approached perfection. The dynamic law of attraction and reaction needed only a Newton to fix it in algebraic form.At last, in 410, Alaric sacked Rome, and the slave-ridden, agricultural, uncommercial Western Empire — the poorer and less Christianized half — went to pieces. </p

Failure , Loss

“It was nearly inevitable that someone would turn to tribal Africa for some, at least, of this labor. It is paradoxical but true that a large measure of the labor that turned America into a sanctuary for freedom came from slavery. The slave trade that developed between North America and the west coast of Africa is one of the great horror stories of western civilization”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, God Bless America (2008), Slavery and the Human Story
Context: Slavery came to the English colonies in North America in the 17th century because the colonists found themselves in possession of a vast continent, needing only cultivation to make it the homes of millions of free, prosperous, God-fearing human beings. Those who came from Europe would be refugees from the tyranny and oppression of feudalism, divine right monarchy, and religious intolerance. But converting this vast wilderness into cultivated lands required labor. It was nearly inevitable that someone would turn to tribal Africa for some, at least, of this labor. It is paradoxical but true that a large measure of the labor that turned America into a sanctuary for freedom came from slavery. The slave trade that developed between North America and the west coast of Africa is one of the great horror stories of western civilization. It resulted also from the unlimited greed of the African chiefs who enslaved their brother Africans, and then sold them to white slave traders. They in turn sold them, for vast profits, into the new world.

Freedom

“We must respect our own dignity as rational beings and thus diminish the power of fraud. It is better to be free than be a slave, better to know than to be ignorant.”

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) Indian philosopher and statesman who was the first Vice President and the second President of India

Eminent Indians (1947)
Context: We must respect our own dignity as rational beings and thus diminish the power of fraud. It is better to be free than be a slave, better to know than to be ignorant. It is reason that helps us to reject what is falsely taught and believed about God, that He is a detective officer or a capricious despot or a glorified schoolmaster. It is essential that we should subject religious beliefs to the scrutiny of reason.

Fraud

“Ah, Mr. Douglas! Mr. Douglas! if the little child just born to you were stolen from your arms and sold into slavery, and you went through fire and water to rescue her, would you say so airily, so jauntily, with such pleasant humor, that if you went to steal her you trust you would be caught and put in jail with other thieves? And yet not more do you love that child hanging at this moment upon her mother's bosom, than an old slave mother whom I know in the hospital across the river loved the child who forty years ago was torn from her breast and sold, and of whose fate for forty years that silent, sorrowing Rachel has not heard?”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)
Context: Mister Douglas in his speech at Memphis expressly says, 'Whenever a territory has a climate, soil, and productions making it the interest of the inhabitants to encourage slave property, they will pass a slave-code and give it encouragement'. He adds that they have a right to do it, and in his late speech at Columbus he declares that there must be no interference with any action of any state, insisting, according to the report, amid great laughter at the exquisite humor of the witticism, 'If you go over to Virginia to steal her Negroes, I trust she will catch you and put you in jail with other thieves'. Ah, Mr. Douglas! Mr. Douglas! if the little child just born to you were stolen from your arms and sold into slavery, and you went through fire and water to rescue her, would you say so airily, so jauntily, with such pleasant humor, that if you went to steal her you trust you would be caught and put in jail with other thieves? And yet not more do you love that child hanging at this moment upon her mother's bosom, than an old slave mother whom I know in the hospital across the river loved the child who forty years ago was torn from her breast and sold, and of whose fate for forty years that silent, sorrowing Rachel has not heard?

Love , Fate , Water

“If a Southerner came across from Virginia to Pennsylvania and saw a black man that he thought he would like to have as a slave, he had to say, 'Well, that’s my runaway slave', and this runaway slave would then be arrested and confined, and then there would be a hearing before a federal commissioner. And the would-be slave owner could summon witnesses—as many as he wanted. The man accused of being a slave could summon no witnesses, had no counsel. And if the federal commissioner decided he was a slave, he was paid $10, and if he decided he was a free man, he was paid $5. It’s hard to imagine any law passed in either Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia that was more inconsistent with the principles of civil liberty than the Fugitive Slave Act.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The South was a Closed Society
Context: There were eight of them that had laws trying to protect black people who were free from being kidnapped as slaves, because under the law of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act. If a Southerner came across from Virginia to Pennsylvania and saw a black man that he thought he would like to have as a slave, he had to say, 'Well, that’s my runaway slave', and this runaway slave would then be arrested and confined, and then there would be a hearing before a federal commissioner. And the would-be slave owner could summon witnesses—as many as he wanted. The man accused of being a slave could summon no witnesses, had no counsel. And if the federal commissioner decided he was a slave, he was paid $10, and if he decided he was a free man, he was paid $5. It’s hard to imagine any law passed in either Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia that was more inconsistent with the principles of civil liberty than the Fugitive Slave Act.

Law , Imagination

Quotes about slave page 12

Quotes about slave
page 12