#slavery

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 would be violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy dead; that the herculean effort to forget would be threatened by memory desperate to stay alive. To render enslavement as a personal experience, language must first get out of the way. ↗

— Toni Morrison

#experience

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

There is no subjection so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom. ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#freedom

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 the safest slavery, to peace bought with ignorance, cowardice, and submission? ↗

— CrimethInc.

#anarchy #freedom #liberty #slavery #speech

You can't tell how heavy somebody else's load is just from looking. The Lord doesn't give us more than we can carry ↗

— Lalita Tademy

#hardness #heavy #lalita-tademy #life #load

I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes, - a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, - a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, - and a dark shelter under, which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of the slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others. ↗

— Frederick Douglass

#frederick-douglass #religion #slavery #life