Slave Quotes
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Thou art a slave, whom fortune's tender arm
With favour never clasp'd; but bred a dog.
William Shakespeare
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I keep hearing the argument that some things are constitutional while other things are not. The idea is that we should be in favor of all the things that were decided over 200 years ago by a bunch of slave-owning cross-dressers who pooped in holes.
Scott Adams
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But assuming the same premises, to wit, that all men are equal by the law of nature and of nations, the right of property in slaves falls to the ground; for one who is equal to another cannot be the owner or property of that other.
William H. Seward
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At those moments I saw myself suddenly for what I was: a slave, willing to always do what he wanted, careful not to exaggerate in order not to get him in trouble, not to displease him. I wasted my time cooking for him, washing the dirty clothes he left in the house, listening to all his troubles at the university and in the many responsibilities that he was accumulating, thanks to the aura of good feeling that surrounded him and the small powers of his father-in-law; I always welcomed him joyfully, I wanted him to be happier with me than in the other house, I wanted him to relax, to confide, I felt sorry that he was continuously overwhelmed by obligations; I even wondered if Eleonora might love him more than I did, since she accepted every insult just to feel that he was still hers. But sometimes I couldn’t stand it anymore and I yelled at him, despite the risk that the girls might hear: Who am I for you, tell me why I’m in this city, why I wait for you every night, why I tolerate this situation.
Elena Ferrante
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Outward, thanks to the knowledge of physical laws, man could subdue nature, but inwardly, he remained a slave to it. For, when all is said and done, at what is aiming all this display or deployment of activity, if not to realized outward profits, to provide material pleasure or enjoyment. It is not the first time that men sell their birth right for a dish of lentils, and thus disown or repudiate or deny the best of thmeselves.
African Spir
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I have only to speak for myself; to speak for freedom for myself; to determine for freedom for myself; and in doing so, I speak and determine for the freedom of every slave on every plantation, and for the fugitives on my right hand.
Charles Lenox Remond
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Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction.
Simone de Beauvoir
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The biggest surprise for me, without a doubt, was that the first black people who came to the United States weren't the 20 who arrived in Jamestown in 1619. All of us had been taught that. The first African came to Florida in 1513. And the huge shock is we know his name, Juan Garrido, and that he wasn't a slave. He was free!
Henry Louis Gates
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He was by no means opposed to hard labour on principle, for he would work away at a cricket-match by the day together, - running, and catching, and batting, and bowling, and revelling in toil which would exhaust a galley-slave.
Charles Dickens
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I never mean, unless some particular circumstances should compel it, to possess another slave by purchase, it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted, by which slavery in this country may be abolished by law.
George Washington
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Ending the slave trade was contrary to British economic interests. For all its limitations and hypocrisies - British slavery itself, of course, still continued to exist - I still think it was a great moment in human history.
Henry Louis Gates
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To every man, even though he be a slave, the light of heaven is sweet.
Euripides
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That god forbid, that made me first your slave, I should in thought control your times of pleasure, Or at your hand th' account of hours to crave, Being your vassal bound to stay your leisure.
William Shakespeare
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Nearly all men are slaves for the same reason that the Spartans assigned for the servitude of the Persians -- lack of power to pronounce the syllable, "No." To be able to utter that word and live alone, are the only means to preserve one's freedom and one's character.
Sébastien-Roch Nicolas
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I am according to my slave's expectations of me: if good, then good, and if bad, then bad.
Alaa Al Aswany
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The slave and those whose present life is miserable and who can find no consolation in the heavens are assured that at least the future belongs to them. The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves.
Albert Camus
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No one is more of a slave than he who thinks himself free without being so.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“Figures cannot calculate the amount collected by those public and private robbers: it is more than would liberate every slave in the United States; it would pay the British debt! They say, We do not force people to give. I see no difference between forcing a man out of his money, at the mouth of a pistol, and forcing it from by trick and cunning; the crime is the same.”
Anne Royall
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There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.
Helen Keller
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Voluptuous habits speedily bind all the powers of the soul in loathsome vassalage, and exclude every thought except such as relate to the beastly pleasures of which it is the slave. Distracted by cravings as inexorable as they are base, and in their vileness perpetually reproduced, — tantalized by the impure fountains of a diseased imagination, and oppressed with its own effeminacy, — the mind loses its vigor and its productiveness. Every faculty rapidly deteriorates and decays; memory becomes extinguished, inanity destroys resolution, and the heart is as cold and callous as a cinder extinct. It ceases to love, to sympathize, and diffuse the delicious tears that sanctify friendship's shrine. The whole countenance assumes an expression of obdurateness and repugnance. The features, marked with premature decay, proclaim that the source of gentle sentiments, pure emotions, and innocent joys, is exhausted, like a limpid fountain invaded by the scoria and flame of a volcano. All the elements of life seem to have retreated into their abused organs only to perish there. Even the organs themselves are withered, and worse than dead; their infirmities, maladies, sufferings, rush in a multitude upon the degraded victim, and overwhelm him in awful retribution.
Elias Lyman Magoon
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I was born a slave-was the child of slave parents-therefore I came upon the earth free in God-like thought, but fettered in action.
Elizabeth Keckley
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Woman has always been man's dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.
Simone de Beauvoir
