I have observed this in my experience of slavery, – that whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking...

Most of us spend all our working life dreaming of doing nothing, then when we end up doing nothing, we long for something. When we have neither longing, I think that is what they call...

The problem with working, I mean not self-employed, is that you have to get up and routinely do something that you do not want to do, plus you get talked down to, ordered around by...

Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.

Although slavery has long been a part of human history, American chattel slavery represents a case of human trauma incomparable in scope, duration and consequence to any other incidence of human enslavement.

But no sooner had morning broken than he took hold of his whip and ceremoniously stepped out to address his slaves. Each blow was liberating, it was like unshaking proof of the great lie of...

A realist is a slave to reality.

You’ll see some bad things, but if you didn’t see them, they’d still be happening.

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight,...

When I speak of God, I mean that god who prevented man from putting forth his hand and taking also of the fruit of the tree of life that he might live forever; of that...

You have a chance to save lives! If you don’t take it, you may regret it!

He had been bored, that’s all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen – and that explains most human...

I am grateful, and would thank the Gods(if there were any to thank) that I have finally mastered this art of forgetting–of murdering the memory.

That is what the Slave Trade was all about. Not death from poxes and musketry and whippings and malnutrition and melancholy and suicide: death itself. For before the white men came to Guinea to strip-mine...

Because I care about human beings, I want them to be free to do what is right for them. Isn’t that more important than mere peace on earth? Isn’t freedom, even dangerous freedom, preferable to...

These dear souls came not to Sabbath school because it was popular to do so, nor did I teach them because it was reputable to be thus engaged. Every moment they spent in that school,...

That was when I realized we weren’t born to beslaves. It was ignorant for any man to think he could be the master of another. We were all meant to be free, and somewhere there...

What is it like to be so free – so trapped, but so free? What kind of bird sings only when caught? What kind of slave outshines and rises above her master?

For guns and ammunition,” says I.

As he plods behind Cameron and Summer, he can’t help but stare at Summer’s exposed, glistening skin. His thoughts aren’t depraved or even mildly in the splasher. In fact, he focuses on the marks of...

Jesus treats patriarchy the way he treats much else of the law and custom of his time: ambiguously, suggestively, and sometimes subversively, but never immediately revolutionarily outside the central matter of his own mission and...

To be enslaved then, you needed to be ignorant. To be enslaved today, you need to be knowledgeable.

The stuff of nightmare is their plain bread. They butter it with pain. They set their clocks by deathwatch beetles, and thrive the centuries. They were the men with the leather-ribbon whips who sweated up...

In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under control and out of control would be persuasive throughout; that the order and quietitude of every day life...

no matter how rich.

WE KNOW YOU ARE SURROUNDED BY DARKNESS… IN THE TERROR FOREST! WE HOPE FOR MOONLIGHT!

The day he was to sell the children from their mother he would tell that mother to go to some other place to do some work and in their absence he would sell the children....

Vampire Willow Rosenberg: “In my world, we have people in chains, and we can ride them like ponies.

typical” white Southerner was not a slaveholding planter but a small farmer who tried, often without success, to achieve both relative self-sufficiency and a steady income from marketable cash crops.

Again, where the people are absolute rulers of the land, they rejoice in having the openness and exuberance of youth, while a tyrant counts this a danger, and seeks to slay or silence those possessed...

As a rule,I believe people shouldn’t follow rules;rules should follow people.

While all men want to be free, some want to be free to think what they want, and other men want to be free from the burden of free thought. These men seek freedom through...

Government is nothing more than the combined force of society or the united power of the multitude for the peace, order, safety, good, and happiness of the people… There is no king or queen bee...

Denial of climate change and degradation of environment for the purpose of economic prosperity is humiliation and slavery of the nature.

Isn’t it funny how freedom is only another word for slavery?

We believed that it was most desirable that the North should win, we believed in the principle that the Union is indissoluable, we, or many of us at least, also believed that the conflict was...

Look at meI am the life in a wastelandLook at meI am the slavery through the agesLook at meI am the mirror of the worldLook at meI am the illusion I’ve fought forLook at meI’m...

A man is always a little shamefaced on his wedding day, like a fox caught in a baited trap, ensnared because his greed overcame his better judgment. The menfolk laughed at Charlie that spring day,...

And what is that religion that sanctions, even by its silence, all that is embraced in the ‘Peculiar Institution’? If there can be any thing more diametrically opposed to the religion of Jesus, than the...

Everything is acceptable until we stop accepting them.

How prudently most men creep into nameless graves, while now and then one or two forget themselves into immortality.

This is slavery, not to speak one’s thought.

The good man is free, even if he is a slave. The evil man is a slave, even if he is a king.

Strip by strip the lash carved into Grace’s shuddering flesh. My tears were falling by then, heavy drops, joining in the leaf dust with the blood that had begun to trickle from the table. My...

The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and...

in this great land of the free we call it human trafficking. And so long as we don’t partake in the luxury, ignoring slavery is of no consequence. It is much easier to look away...

Deeds of heroism are wrought here more than those of romance, when, defying torture, and braving death itself, the fugitive voluntarily threads his way back to the terrors and perils of that dark land, that...

Democracy is supposed to be ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’. Capitalism is ‘of the capitalist, for the capitalist’. Period.

Once again she would arrive at a foreign place. Once again be the newcomer, an outsider, the one who did not belong. She knew from experience that she would quickly have to ingratiate herself with...

Never before in history has such a sweeping fervor for freedom expressed itself in great mass movements which are driving down the bastions of empire. This wind of change blowing through Africa, as I have...