#slavery

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

#cured #evils #fighting #goals #ignorance

How many women are there ... who because of their husbands' harshness spend their weary lives in the bond of marriage in greater suffering than if they were slaves among the Saracens? ↗

— Christine de Pizan

#husbands #lovelessness #marriage #married-life #matrimony

This and many others only confirmed me in the opinion, planted when I saw the sale of Martha Ann, and growing steadily thereafter, that slavery was an accursed business, and that the sooner my people were relieved of it, the better. ↗

— John Sergeant Wise

#ann #better #business #confirmed #growing

To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#father #form #less #odious #profession

Human beings have capitalized on the silence of animals, just as certain human beings have historically imposed silence on certain other human beings by denying slaves the right to literacy, denying women the right to own property, and denying both the right to vote. ↗

— Gary Steiner

#domestication #injustice #justice #morality #oppression

Wealth is a tool of freedom, but the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery. ↗

— Frank Herbert

#pursuit #slavery #tool #way #wealth

We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#civilization #european #exists #name #now

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 of plans to gain my freedom. I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceased to be a man. ↗

— Frederick Douglass

#slavery #experience

Slavery is no more sinful, by the Christian code, than it is sinful to wear a whole coat, while another is in tatters, to eat a better meal than a neighbor, or otherwise to enjoy ease and plenty, while our fellow creatures are suffering and in want. ↗

— James F. Cooper

#better #christian #coat #code #creatures

Grandmother pointed out my brother Perry, my sister Sarah, and my sister Eliza, who stood in the group. I had never seen my brother nor my sisters before; and, though I had sometimes heard of them, and felt a curious interest in them, I really did not understand what they were to me, or I to them. We were brothers and sisters, but what of that? Why should they be attached to me, or I to them? Brothers and sisters were by blood; but slavery had made us strangers. I heard the words brother and sisters, and knew they must mean something; but slavery had robbed these terms of their true meaning. ↗

— Frederick Douglass

#siblings #slavery #family