85 quotes about slavery follow in order of popularity. Be sure to bookmark and share your favorites!

Life without the courage for death is slavery.

Seneca

The most onerous slavery is to be a slave to oneself.

Seneca

A strict belief, fate is the worst kind of slavery; on the other hand there is comfort in the thought that God will be moved by our prayers.

Epicurus

Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.

Nelson Mandela

Patterning your life around other's opinions is nothing more than slavery.

Lawana Blackwell

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains or slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take but as for me; give me liberty or give me death!

Patrick Henry

Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible.

Isaiah Berlin

The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight-of-hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in inequity and born in sin... But if you want to continue to be slaves of the bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let the bankers continue to create money and control credit .

Josiah Charles Stamp

[Muhammad's] greatest contribution to African Americans was in restoring their sense of pride and offering them an alternative to Christianity, for which slavery left a bitter aftertaste, ... But his greatest failure was in refusing to lead them beyond the pride of race and to do what his son Wallace has done: to guide black people beyond a race-based version of Islam to orthodox Islam.

Karl Evanzz

Farming with live animals is a 7 day a week, legal form of slavery.

George Segal

This is how we kept the African soul alive though centuries of slavery.

Pai Decio Babalaorixa

This is an exciting opportunity to talk about creating a united front against this 21st century slavery.

Marilyn Carlson Nelson

The private control of credit is the modern form of slavery.

Upton Sinclair

For humanity has moved forward to an era when wrong and slavery are being displaced, and reason and justice are being recognized as the rule of life.

Mary Ashton Livermore

It's a modern day slavery. It's a modern day apartheid when people here are being used for their work and they don't have any rights whatsoever.

Paul Lopez

If we have the courage and tenacity of our forebears, who stood firmly like a rock against the lash of slavery, we shall find a way to do for our day what they did for theirs.

Mary Mcleod Bethune

Truthfully, human trafficking is just a polite way to say modern-day slavery.

Cathy Paris

The flag that was the symbol of slavery on the high seas for a long time was not the Confederate battle flag, it was sadly the Stars and Stripes.

Alan Keyes

Slavery ends and everyone's friends now, right? I wish it could happen that nicely.

Charles Murray

To this point, the few films that have focused on the issue of slavery have not performed well at the box office.

Martin Grove

Blood is a cleansing and sanctifying thing, and the nation that regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood... there are many things more horrible than bloodshed, and slavery is one of them!

George Gissing

History is not going to be kind to liberals. With their mindless programs, they've managed to do to Black Americans what slavery, Reconstruction, and rank racism found impossible: destroy their family and work ethic.

Walter Williams

My principal objections to orthodox religion are two - slavery here and hell hereafter.

Robert Green Ingersoll

The United Nations Security Council has been silent on the war in northern Uganda for two decades. In that time over 25,000 children in northern Uganda have been abducted by the LRA and many forced into sexual slavery and made to become child soldiers.

Greg Puley

There is no slavery but ignorance.

Robert Ingersoll

Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery.

Leon Litwack

Voodoo is not some kind of black magic cult. It's the distillation of very profound religious ideas that came over during the tragic era of slavery.

Wade Davis

I want to ask, does Pakistan have sovereignty at all? They are cooperating with America in the war against terrorism, but can they not distinguish between cooperation and slavery?

Imran Khan

We are convinced that the risen masses must stand at the heart and in the vanguard of the great historic process to eradicate the legacy of slavery, colonialism, apartheid and neo-colonialism.

Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki

Held in virtual slavery.

Doris Meissner

For too long, immigrant women have been abused and exploited in this country. This project aims to challenge the systems that keep immigrant women in slavery-like conditions in the United States. It is shameful that the sexual abuse of poor immigrant women continues in this nation in the 21st century.

Mary Bauer

Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.

Andy Warhol

The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is such that what in itself would enable us to construct it richly plunges us instead into a poverty of abundance, making alienation all the more intolerable as each convenience promises liberation and turns out to be only one more burden. We are condemned to slavery to the means of liberation.

Raoul Vaneigem

To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery -even though it would mean the elimination of what is commonly called happiness -is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself. Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be.

Andre Breton

The Confederacy's two most famous generals from Virginia were both opposed to slavery, and Jackson himself even disregarded state law in his day to teach slaves to read.

Brandon Dorsey

I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed; the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!

Frederick Douglass

Slavery still exists today. I am standing before you as living proof. As a slave, I didn't know how to say no, I only knew how to say yes. I was beaten if I didn't say yes loudly enough; I was beaten for no reason at all.

Simon Deng

(It) focuses on African-American sites, culture, history, events that happened around the United States and Canada. There's a lot of African-American history in Canada because during slavery, we escaped to Canada.

Wayne Robinson

It's a modern form of slavery, where criminals earn the most money.

Ulrike Helwerth

Let us remember that slavery was always the law until some brave citizens stood up and said, 'This is not right.' .

Patty Berg

By the time of the Civil War slavery was not an issue in the North. The issue was in the South and so it was very easy to continue to demonize the South after the Civil War.

Valerie Cunningham

. . . what a burning shame it is that many of the pieces on the subject of slavery and the slave trade, contained in different school books, have been lost sight of, or been subject to the pruning knife of the slaveholding expurgatorial system!

Robert Purvis

Illegal immigration is the greatest threat to African-Americans since slavery. We're fired up. We can't take it anymore.

Ted Hayes

Blacks in America want to forget about slavery -- the stigma, the shame. That's the wrong move. If you can't be who you are, who can you be? How can you know what to do? We have our history. We have our book, which is the blues. And we forget it all.

August Wilson

I have observed this in my experience of slavery, that whenever my condition was improved, instead of increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain my freedom. I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one.

Frederick Douglass

The organizers of the International Freedom Center say that in order to understand 9/11, we must see exhibits about slavery, segregation and genocide and its impact around the world. This is a history that we all should know and learn, but not here -- not on sacred ground.

Michael Burke

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

Abraham Lincoln

One hundred years, ... America will be last. America's always last. Great Britain did away with slavery 100 years before we did and it was a vote, not a war. Pakistan has had a female prime minister and we're still just fantasizing about a female president.

Dan Savage

Washington was born into slavery and living in the heart of the South, raising himself up by his bootstraps.

Michael Cobb

Democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom: left to themselves they will seek it, cherish it, and view any deprivation of it with regret. But for equality their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible: they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery.

Alexis De Tocqueville

Enjoy things which are pleasant; that is not the evil: it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.

Thomas Carlyle

I come from a country in which human beings are still being bought and sold into slavery.

Simon Deng

He was the chief architect of the Fugitive Slave Act -- though he abhorred slavery. Runaway slaves could be returned to their masters no matter where they were, no matter how long they had been living free. It was violently detested. There were riots.

Robert Schenkkan

St. Patrick escaped from slavery, studied in a monastery, and was appointed a bishop to Ireland. He traveled throughout the country, establishing monasteries, schools and churches, and he is known for converting the Irish people to Christianity.

Marc Lewis

[Colonization] was supposed to be sort of a remedy for slavery and racial inequality in the country.

Claude Clegg

I would encourage the people of Mongolia to clearly understand what type of company Ivanhoe Mines is. Skin, respiratory and other types of diseases and sicknesses are common among local people who live near the copper-site that Ivanhoe Mines owns. They operate a modern form of slavery.

Martin Klein

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, None but ourselves can free our minds.

Bob Marley

Imagine the wailing accusations of hypocrisy in the US were Germany to build a national museum in Berlin to commemorate not Nazi genocide but US slavery or the extermination of the Native Indians.

Norman Finkelstein

Maybe in February, you might talk about it for a while. There's slavery and the Civil War, then nothing for (100 years). Then there's Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, and that's it — like they were the only two who ever did anything. It gets glossed over.

Sam Perry

All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.

Noah Webster

The permit scheme authorized by Foreign Minister Pierre Pettigrew in 1998 has been connected to organized crime, slavery, & the trafficking of juveniles and the IATC now hopes the deaths of these two young men will see the permit program finally abolished.

Gregory Carlin

I read "Up From Slavery" and then my dream -- if I may so call it -- of being a race leader dawned.

Marcus Garvey

The emerging picture is one where slavery, oppression and exploitation of society's most vulnerable members have by no means been consigned to the past.

Juan Somavia

Congress would exclude slavery from any territory that in the future might be acquired from Mexico.

David Wilmot

Passover has a message for the conscience and the heart of all mankind. For what does it commemorate? It commemorates the deliverance of a people from degrading slavery, from most foul and cruel tyranny. And so, it is Israel's - nay, God's protest against unrighteousness, whether individual or national.

Morris Joseph

Sometimes it worries me if people think that this is a movie about slavery, or it's a movie that's going to challenge you on the level of how you feel about slavery that they're going to resist seeing it.

Jonathan Demme

War is Peace Freedom is Slavery Ignorance is Strength.

George Orwell

New Jersey was the last (northern) state to abolish slavery, and even if we are the last state to abolish abortion, it will happen eventually.

Marie Tasy

If any religion allows the persecution of the people of different faiths, if any religion keeps women in slavery, if any religion keeps people in ignorance, then I can't accept that religion.

Taslima Nasrin

All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence, the former - of the corruption of the will.

Alexander Herzen

I was constantly under terror. I'm here as living proof of slavery.

Simon Deng

When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy it implies, then the 'division' of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.

Simone de Beauvoir

The culture survives. It's survived slavery. It's survived everything so far?. I don't think you can stop the dance. I don't think you can drown the dance. We dance at funerals, and now we have to dance at our own funeral.

Quint Davis

The African-American Freedom Trail: From Slavery to Freedom in New York City.

Christopher Moore

I read a funny story about how the Republicans freed the slaves. The Republicans are the ones who created slavery by law in the 1600's. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and he was not a Republican.

Marion Berry

We are supporting slavery in other countries and are hurting American workers.

Paul Streitz

Law is a mental hair shirt. He admits a great longing for financial independence from the routine of desk slavery.

Paul Gallico

It is slavery to live in the mind unless it has become part of the body.

Kahlil Gibran

Gettysburg proved a significant turning point in the war, and therefore in the preservation of the United States and abolition of slavery. The Civil War ended lingering doubts since its conception about whether the United States would survive.

James Mcpherson

Every emancipation has in it the seeds of a new slavery, and every truth easily becomes a lie.

I. F. Stone

I would have the Constitution torn in shreds and scattered to the four winds of heaven. Let us destroy the Constitution and build on its ruins the temple of liberty. I have brothers in slavery. I have seen chains placed on their limbs and beheld them captive.

William Wells Brown

That means this is all part of a reparations mentality, that we owe something special [to African Americans] because of slavery, segregation, whatever. I understand that mentality, but I don't accept it.

Chester Finn

After it gets passed in Idaho and through the United States our grandkids will look back on it like slavery.

John Bayes

Young girls and women, bought and sold, first to work in prostitution. That's slavery. We choose to believe that they are prostitutes and we don't look into it.

Iana Matei

Fling out the Anti-Slavery flag;Forever let it beThe emblem to a holy cause,The banner of the free.And never from its guardian heightLet it by man be driven,But let it float forever there,Beneath the smiles of heaven.

William Wells Brown