Slave Quotations

The idea of making a film - a film that I had certainly never seen before - about the slave experience was a huge responsibility. It's a project that requires a wider understanding of the geopolitical nature of the slave trade, of historical and modern-day racism.

The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave.

And I particularly like the whole thing of being boss. Boss and employee... It's the slave quality that I find very alluring.

The first Western attempt to save Africa from itself was in the late 19th century. It was led by Christian missionaries who claimed to be seeking to end poverty, disease and the slave trade.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

I would rather drudge out my life on a cotton plantation, till the grave opened to give me rest, than to live with an unprincipled master and a jealous mistress.

For slaves to fashion, the rules are made to be broken.

I think if 'The Narrow Road To The Deep North' is one of the high points of Japanese culture, then the experience of my father, who was a slave laborer on the Death Railway, represents one of its low points.

People say that slaves were taken from Africa. This is not true: People were taken from Africa, among them healers and priests, and were made into slaves.

We are men, and propose to live like men in this free land, without the contamination of slave labor, or die like men, if need be, in asserting the rights of our race, our country, and our families.

I starred in a Broadway play that was Sidney Poitier's first directing job and the cast was Lou Gossett, Cicely Tyson, Diana Ladd and I played a Jewish kid who offered himself as a slave to two Columbia University students as reparations.

The slaves of socialism are slaves, but they are no one's property and therefore no one's loss.

As long as a word remains unspoken, you are its master; once you utter it, you are its slave.

If you are worthy of its affection, a cat will be your friend but never your slave.

Soul music is pain - you can hear the slaves, the beatin' and the hurtin'.

We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.

The priest is Christ's slave, and Christ himself took the form of a slave and became obedient to death. So the priest in serving human needs lives a Godward life, possessed by God and witnessing that only when lives are utterly possessed by God do they find their true freedom.

The violinist must possess the poet's gift of piercing the protective hide which grows on propagandists, stockbrokers and slave traders, to penetrate the deeper truth which lies within.

I like to think of myself as being fashion-conscious without being a slave to fashion.

There can be no tyrants where there are no slaves.

Your secret is your prisoner; once you reveal it, you become its slave.

There's a basis for the war, historically, in the 'Hunger Games,' which would be the third servile war, which was Spartacus' war, where you have a man who is a slave who is then turned into a gladiator who broke out of the gladiator school and led a rebellion and then became the face of the war.

There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power.

He who dares not (reason), is a slave.

From deep in the slave hut is somebody calling over 150 years to all of our experiences and all of our ideas on human respect, and all of our ideas on dignity. And I felt like that's just incredibly powerful.

No one is more enslaved than a slave who doesn't think they're enslaved.

The art of being a slave is to rule one's master.

To be one's own master is to be the slave of self.

Besides all this, if you are idle, and take to bad courses, you will hurt those of your brethren who are slaves, and do all in your power to prevent their being free.

Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals; love, an abject intercourse between tyrants and slaves.

As yet, the Negroes themselves do not fully appreciate these old slave songs.

You learn to cook so that you don't have to be a slave to recipes. You get what's in season and you know what to do with it.

Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, Robert Lincoln bought a nice ski lodge.

The right to have a slave implies the right in some one to make the slave; that right must be equal and mutual, and this would resolve society into a state of perpetual war.

The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads in the Civil War and justified it.

Moses freed the Jews. Lincoln freed the slaves. I freed the neurotics.

If we should ever get to Heaven, we shall find nobody to reproach us for being black, or for being slaves.

Then it was that the exports of slaves from Virginia and the Carolinas was so great that the population of those States remained almost, if not quite stationary.

Oh while I live, to be the ruler of life, not a slave, to meet life as a powerful conqueror, and nothing exterior to me will ever take command of me.

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

A woman who does not become the slave of just one man becomes the slave of all men.

I WAS born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away

On the king's gate the moss grew gray; The king came not. They call'd him dead; And made his eldest son, one day, Slave in his father's stead.

The custom of speaking to God Almighty as freely as with a slave - caring nothing whether the words are suitable or not, but simply saying the first thing that comes to mind from being learnt by rote by frequent repetition - cannot be called prayer: God grant that no Christian may address Him in this manner.

What to the Slave is the 4th of July.

God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners (morality).

I'm not a slave to anything anymore. And I never will be again.

Wisely used history can give pleasure and provide us with a useful tool; but we should not become its slaves.

No more turning a blind eye to Chinese spies in our nuclear labs. No more keeping silent about Chinese slave labor camps.

It is a great mistake, as we have already remarked, to be afraid of Him and to act in His presence like a timid and craven slave trembling with fright before his master.

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.

See, it's no in between: you're either free or you're a slave.

He who is a slave to his stomach seldom worships God.

Slavery was regarded by Aristotle as an ordinance of nature, and so probably was it by the slaves themselves in olden time.

If a man carries his horse out of a slave State into a free one, be does not lose his property interest in him; but if he carries his slave into a free State, the law makes him free.

The proposition of an established classification of states as slave states and free states, as insisted on by some, and into northern and southern, as maintained by others, seems to me purely imaginary, and of course the supposed equilibrium of those classes a mere conceit.

Many attempts had been made by colonial legislatures to cut off or to tax the importation of slaves.

The poor despise labor when performed by slaves.

What good to me is the festive garment of freedom when I am in a slave's smock at home?

If you don't have many possessions, then you don't need to work all your life like a slave to sustain them, and therefore you have more time for yourself.

The camera is the slave to the actor.

You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to... do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa.

I'm not gonna be a slave. I'm a rock n' roller.

The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear.

Lincoln emancipated nobody. The man freed not a single slave.

We are slaves to whatever we don't understand.

Was it not enough punishment and suffering in history that we were uprooted and made helpless slaves not only in new colonial outposts but also domestically.

I am simply not such a slave to my vanity, and I don't want to be, because as you get older you really have to start accepting the inevitable.

It seems that it is madder never to abandon one's self than often to be infatuated; better to be wounded, a captive and a slave, than always to walk in armor.

The male corporate model is built on a mans greater willingness to be a slave of sorts - especially once he has to provide for children.

Nor was it only from the millions of slaves that chains had been removed; the whole nation had been in bondage; free speech had been suppressed.

Now a slave is not 'held' by any legal contract, obligation, duty, or authority, which the laws will enforce. He is 'held' only by brute force. One person beats another until the latter will obey him, work for him, if he require it, or do nothing if he require it.

But it required a disastrous, internecine war to bring this question of human freedom to a crisis, and the process of striking the shackles from the slave was accomplished in a single hour.

My father was a man of great charity towards the poor, and compassion for the sick, and also for servants; so much so, that he never could be persuaded to keep slaves, for he pitied them so much: and a slave belonging to one of his brothers being once in his house, was treated by him with as much tenderness as his own children.

I like suggesting that ‘we are slaves to the objects around us,’ that ‘plenty should be enough,’ or that the ‘buyer should beware,’ within the context of conventional selling space.

He who gives away shall have real gain. He who subdues himself shall be free; he shall cease to be a slave of passions. The righteous man casts off evil, and by rooting out lust, bitterness, and illusion do we reach Nirvana.

When the early Europeans first met Africans, at the crossroads of history, it was a respectful meeting and the Africans were not slaves. Their nations were old before Europe was born.

He that communicates his secret to another makes himself that other's slave.

The Spartans were a paradoxical people. They were the biggest slave owners in Greece. But at the same time, Spartan women had an unusual level of rights. It's a paradox that they were a bunch of people who in many ways were fascist, but they were the bulwark against the fall of democracy.

When the slaves left Africa, they left us this music. They left us blues.

Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave ships dropped us off.

An Enlightened Master is ideal only if your goal is to become a Benighted Slave.

Under a dictatorship, a nation ceases to exist. All that remains is a fiefdom, a planet of slaves regimented by aliens from outer-space.

I've always been a slave to my heart.

Why hast thou made me born in this country, The inhabitant of which is satisfied with being a slave?

I defied the machinery to make me its slave. Its incessant discords could not drown the music of my thoughts if I would let them fly high enough.

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.

The slave may be happy, but happiness is not enough.

In the twenty-first century, the robot will take the place which slave labor occupied in ancient civilization.

The Free State men, myself among them, took it for granted that Missouri was a slave state.

A man in debt is so far a slave.

No slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is.

He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave

Too many would-be executives are slaves of routine.

Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.

Having enough money has to go hand in hand with living in a way that you're not being a slave to your possessions.

It's no longer necessary to slave over the vocals. I don't sing the lyrics until I write them, and singing is the very last thing I do. I record the entire track, and then I worry about lyrics and vocals. The music will suggest where the words are going to a certain extent.

And so, whether they came here on the Mayflower, on a slave ship, or on an airplane from Havana, we are all descendants of the men and women who built here the nation that saved the world.

I don't have an assistant. I make a lot of people around me my slaves, but no assistant.

One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves.