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It [God belief] is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable unchallengeable tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep. Who can subject you – who must indeed subject you – to a total surveillance ... A celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true? Who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate? ... At least you can fucking die and leave North Korea. Christopher Hitchens
The whole mandate for slavery and segregation is taken directly from the Bible where it is warranted. Christopher Hitchens, lecture 6th October 2009
All the justifications for slavery were religious too. Christopher Hitchens
I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate. I suspected that these moans were from a tortured slave, for I was told that this was the case in another instance. Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have staid in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal. I have seen a little boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a horse-whip (before I could interfere) on his naked head, for having handed me a glass of water not quite clean; I saw his father tremble at a mere glance from his master’s eye ... And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty. Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle 1839 chXXI ‘Mauritius to England’
But there’s no such thing as free. There are only different and more horrible ways to be enslaved. Lauren DeStefano, Fever
Let me tell you why you are here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain. But you feel it. You have felt it your entire life. That there is something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s like there’s a splinter in your mind driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Do you want to know what it is? The Matrix is everything. All around us ... It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. That you are a slave, Neil. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Born into a prison you cannot smell or touch. A prison for your mind. The Matrix 1999 starring Keanu Reeves & Laurence Fishburne & Carrie-Anne Moss & Hugo Weaving & Joe Pantoliano & Gloria Foster & Marcus Chong & Julian Arahanga & Matt Doran & Belinda McClory et al, directors Wachowskis, Morpheus
Across the empire eight million people are slaves with no rights in Roman law. Mankind: The Story of All of Us III, History Channel 2012
A new commodity – human beings. Mankind: The Story of All of Us VIII: Treasure
In Haiti former slaves cast off their chains. Mankind: The Story of All of Us X: Revolutions
America’s four million slaves gain their freedom: the Union wins the Civil War. ibid.
No-one even knows where he came from ... He and his wife were seized and taken to the slave market in Rome. Spartacus: Warriors
Spartacus would become known as the man who fought back ... But most of all he was a slave who took on the might of Rome to be free. ibid.
Kindly remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies. Seneca
Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves? Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria’ 1798
You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know. William Wilberforce
Does any one suppose a slave trade would help their civilization? Is it not plain that she must suffer from it; that civilization must be checked; that her barbarous manners must be made more barbarous; and that the happiness of her millions of inhabitants must be prejudiced with her intercourse with Britain? Does not everyone see that a slave trade carried on around her coasts must carry violence and desolation to her very centre? William Wilberforce
The true way to virtue is by withdrawing from temptation; let us then withdraw from these wretched Africans those temptations to fraud, violence, cruelty, and injustice, which the slave trade furnishes. Wherever the sun shines, let us go round the world with him, diffusing our benevolence; but let us not traffic, only that we may set kings against their subjects, subjects against their kings, sowing discord in every village, fear and terror in every family, setting millions of our fellow creatures a-hunting each other for slaves, creating fairs and markets for human flesh through one whole continent of the world, and, under the name of policy, concealing from ourselves all the baseness and iniquity of such a traffic. William Wilberforce
All this wealth was created at a terrible human cost with the exploitation and suffering of millions of slaves. Professor Jeremy Black, Why the Industrial Revolution Happened Here, BBC 2013
Just under two and a half million slaves were transported by the British across the Atlantic. ibid.
We claim a right to speak about this evil, and also to act in reference to its removal, the more especially because we are of one blood. It is on the Anglo-American race that the hopes of the world for liberty and progress rest. Now it is very grievous to find one portion of this race practicing the gigantic evil, and the other aiding, by increased demands for the produce of slave labor, in perpetuating the enormous wrong. David Livingstone, Missionary Travels and Researchers in South Africa
I would not have a slave to till my ground
To carry me, to fan me while I sleep,
And tremble when I wake, for all the wealth
That sinews bought and sold have ever earn’d. William Cowper, The Task, 1785