We keep our slaves with or without their approval. Gone with the Wind 1939 starring Clark Gable & Vivien Leigh & Leslie Howard & Olivia de Haviland & Thomas Mitchell & Barbara Mitchell & Evelyn Keyes & Ann Rutherford & George Reeves & Fred Crane & Hattie McDaniel & Alicia Rhett et al, director Victor Fleming, father
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave. Blade Runner: The Final Cut 2007 starring Harrison Ford & Rutger Hauer & Sean Young & Daryl Hannah & Edward James Olmos & M Emmet Walsh & William Sanderson & Brion James & Joe Turkel & Joanna Cassidy & James Hong et al, director Ridley Scott, Hauer
Guinan: Consider that in the history of many worlds there have always been disposable creatures. They do the dirty work. They do the work that no-one else wants to do, because it’s too difficult and too hazardous. With an army of Datas, all disposable, you don't have to think about their welfare, or you don’t think about how they feel. Whole generations of disposable people.
Picard: You’re talking about slavery. Star Trek: The Next Generation s2e9: The Measure of a Man
Whether other races prosper or perish or starve interests me only in so far as we need slaves for our culture. Otherwise I’m not interested. Whether the digging of tank traps makes 10,000 Russian women drop from exhaustion interests me only in so far as the ditch is still completed. Heinrich Himmler
Am I not a man and a brother? Josiah Wedgwood, variations & attributions
This man is freed from servile bands,
Of hope to rise, or fear to fall: –
Lord of himself, though not of lands,
And having nothing, yet hath all. Henry Wotton, The Character of a Happy Life, 1614
You would have groaned to see the files of wretches being put up for sale. An accursed deed that men should condemn to slavery their own flesh and blood. Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester
Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil. Edmund Burke
Not all these, laid in bed majestically,
Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave
Who with a body filled and vacant mind
Gets him to rest, crammed with distressful bread. William Shakespeare, Henry V IV i 264-267
Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself
Upon thy wicked dam, come forth! William Shakespeare, The Tempest I ii 321-322, Prospero
Knock off the chains
Of heart-debasing slavery; give to man,
Of every colour and of every clime,
Freedom, which stamps him image of his God. James Grainger, The Sugar Cane, 1764
Their conquest in the Caribbean and in west Africa earned them two Victoria Crosses and the personal favour of Queen Victoria. But these heroes of the empire were despised by whites and seen as traitors to their race by blacks ... The history of the West India Regiment. Gary Beadle, The First Black Britons, BBC 2005
The British travelled to West Africa to trade with African chiefs and their European agents for slaves to bring to the Caribbean and the Americas. ibid.
In 1791 the French Revolution inspired slaves in the French West Indian colony of Haiti to rebel against their masters. ibid.
When one thinks of the degradation in which the hordes of Africa live, the slave trade may be considered a providential act, and we almost repudiate the philanthropy which sees in a man but one thing – material liberty. Jesuit statement
Darwin had an argument about slavery with the captain of the Beagle, and became so angry he was almost thrown off the expedition. Andrew Marr, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, BBC 2009
The Assyrians deported more than four million people during three centuries of dominance – slave labour. Andrew Marr’s History of the World II, BBC 2012
The African slave trade was an entrenched part of the world economic system. Andrew Marr’s History of the World VI: Revolution
Happy, thrice happy now the savage race,
Since Europe took their gold, and gave them grace!
Pastors she sends to help them in their need.
Some can’t write, and others who can’t read. Charles Churchill, 1731-64, Gotham
My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O! my soul is white;
White as an angel is the English child:
But I am black as if bereav’d of light. William Blake, The Little Black Boy
When my mother died I was very young
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep
So your chimneys I sweep and in soot I sleep. William Blake, The Chimney Sweeper
Over the next century Dublin would become a boom town with the largest slave market in Europe. Fergal Keane, The Story of Ireland 1/5, BBC 2011
We first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate. G K Chesterton, An Appeal on Behalf of that Class of Americans Called Africans, 1833
Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils. The unhappy man who has been treated as a brute animal, too frequently sinks beneath the common standard of the human species. The galling chains, that bind his body, do also fetter his intellectual faculties, and impair the social affections of his hear ... To instruct, to advise, to qualify those, who have been restored to freedom, for the exercise and enjoyment of civil liberty ... and to procure for their children an education calculated for their future situation in life; these are the great outlines of the annexed plan, which we have adopted. Benjamin Franklin
Negro Slavery is an evil of Colossal magnitude and I am utterly averse to the admission of Slavery into the Missouri Territories. John Adams
The Employment of Slaves: The African is of an inferior race, whose normal condition is slavery. Prone to barbarism, and incapable of any other state that that of pupil age, he is at his best estate as the slave of the enlightened man of this country. The Mercury 12th November 1864
That man over there say that women needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place. And aren’t I a woman? ... I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me – and aren’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man (when I could get it), and bear the lash as well – and aren’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen them most all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard – and aren’t I a woman? Sojourner Truth, speech to Women’s Rights Convention 1851
If there breathe on earth a slave,
Are ye truly free and brave?
If ye do not feel the chain,
When it works a brother’s pain,
Are ye not base slaves indeed,
Slaves unworthy to be freed? James Russell Lowell, Stanzas on Freedom, 1843
... They are slaves who fear to speak
For the fallen and the weak;
They are slaves who will not choose
Hatred, scoffing, and abuse,
Rather than in silence shrink
From the truth they needs must think;
They are slaves who dare not be. ibid.
The compact which exists between the North and the South is ‘a covenant with death and an agreement with hell’. William Lloyd Garrison, 1843
Our new government is founded on the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man. Alexander Stephens, confederate vice-president
There would be other Shilohs, other Sharpsburgs, other terrors. Men in their thousands now alive would presently be dead; homes so far untouched by sorrow would know tears; new widows and new orphans, some as yet unmarried or unborn, would be made – all, as Lincoln saw it, that the nation might continue and that men now in bondage might have freedom. In issuing the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation he had made certain that there would be no peace except by conquest. Shelby Foote, The Civil War narrative