slaves Quotes

“We are all born free and spend a lifetime becoming slaves to our own false truths.”

“The slaves who could not fly told about the people who could fly to their children. When they were free.”

“There was a great outcryin. The bent back straightened up. Old and young who were called slaves and could fly joined hands.”

“The slaves labored in the fields from sunup to sundown. The owner of the slaves callin himself their Master.”

“Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon of hope to millions of slaves, who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But one hundred years later, the colored America is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the colored American is still sadly crippled by the manacle of segregation and the chains of discrimination.”

″‘Are you the slave of that tall man?’ she asked instead. ‘No,’ the boy said quickly, ‘I’m free. Mr. Fox pays me for stackin’ his wood.‘”

″‘A slave trader from the deep South is comin,’ they whispered. Up and down the cotton rows the message spread, faster than a winging bird.”

“I had been dancing a group of slaves, and at that terrible sound, Spark signaled me to stop my tune.”

“The convicts working the mines were almost all like him. Black, once slave, once free, now slave again.”

“They hadn’t travelled far when someone squawked and cursed. This was followed by uneasy laughter. Something flew past Yukin, its wings pushing it through the air like a swift arrow.”

“No further sound. Nothing. Even the faint creak and lap of ship and sea was suspended. Then the vessel came alive. Footsteps pounded up from the fo’c’sle. There were shouts and oaths as men stumbled over each other.”

“Better to become the bear’s supper than to remain the cow’s slave.”

“A dozen canoes left the island the next morning, some of them enormous vessels capable of carrying a hundred people. All the canoes had slaves on board. Lyapo tried to count them, hiding his hands between his knees as the ticked off the numbers.”

The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don’t turn against him; they crush those beneath them.

“Certainly, of course. I’m very particular in letting them have everything that comes convenient,—anything that doesn’t put one at all out of the way, you know. Mammy can make up her sleep, some time or other; there’s no difficulty about that. She’s the sleepiest concern that ever I saw; sewing, standing, or sitting, that creature will go to sleep, and sleep anywhere and everywhere. No danger but Mammy gets sleep enough. But this treating servants as if they were exotic flowers, or china vases, is really ridiculous,”