#slave

I am the slave of my baptism. Parents, you have caused my misfortune, and you have caused your own. ↗

— Arthur Rimbaud

#baptism #caused #i #i am #misfortune

Muslim delegates concerned about rights in Palestine could have brought their enthusiasm closer to home by addressing the fate of black Christians being slaughtered and enslaved in the Sudan. ↗

— Jack Schwartz

#addressing #being #black #brought #christians

And, indeed, even in the most tumultuous times, the plebiscites of the people always proceeded peacefully when the senate did not interfere, and votes were given with large majorities. The citizens having only one interest, the people had only one will. At the other extreme of the cycle unanimity reappears. This is when citizens, lapsed into servitude, have no longer either freedom or will. Then fear and flattery change voting into acclamation; people no longer deliberate, they worship or they curse. ↗

— Rousseau

#change

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 field hands. ... black people did not die ... the decedent ... took up residence in an afterworld that was in many ways indistinguishable from his former estate. ↗

— David Bradley

#race #race-america #slave-trade #slavery #death

In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle against totalitarianism. We believe that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality around the world. ↗

— Nicholas D. Kristof

#morality #slavery #women #equality

Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice can not sleep forever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! ↗

— Thomas Jefferson

#history #liberty #politics #slavery #freedom

To be obsessed by the idea of freedom, for instance, is itself a form of slavery. Such people are in the chains of the hope of freedom, and are therefore able to do little else than struggle with them. ↗

— Idries Shah

#obsession #slavery #struggle-strength-character #freedom

A man who will enslave his own blood, may not be safely relied on for magnamity. ↗

— Frederick Douglass

#freedom

There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment ↗

— Harriet Jacobs

#kindness #love #slavery #freedom

There are no tyrants if there are no slaves. ↗

— José P. Rizal

#inspiration #slavery #freedom