Human Enslavement Quotes & Sayings

Look on the effect of your religions, those movements that have swept up millions with their fantastical
claims. Look at what they have done to human history. Look at the wars fought on account of them; look at
the persecutions, the massacres. Look at the pure enslavement of reason; look at the price of faith and zeal. — Anne Rice

A law of survival, Ragle had said. Those who refused to respond to the new stimulus would perish. Adapt or perish . . . version of a timeless rule. — Philip K. Dick

By the mid-1770s, the system of bond labor had been thoroughly transformed into a racial caste system predicated on slavery. The degraded status of Africans was justified on the ground that Negros, like the Indians, were an uncivilized lesser race, perhaps even more lacking in intelligence and laudable human qualities than the red-skinned natives. The notion of white supremacy rationalized the enslavement of Africans, even as whites endeavored to form a new nation based on the ideals of equality, liberty, and justice for all. Before democracy, chattel slavery in America was born. — Michelle Alexander

The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind both in theory and practice. — Mikhail Bakunin

God's word is:
'He who strives never perishes.'
I have implicit faith in that promise.
Though, therefore, from my weakness
I fail a thousand times, I shall not lose faith. — Mahatma Gandhi

Although slavery has long been a part of human history, American chattel slavery represents a case of human trauma incomparable in scope, duration and consequence to any other incidence of human enslavement. — Joy DeGruy

In terms of the characters I think are really fun to play, a lot of times it's someone in my head saying 'I know that woman.' — Melissa McCarthy

The gospel proclaims human freedom and dignity more than human enslavement and depravity. What is needed is a balance of biblical values and emphasis on the empowering quality of the gospel. The spiritual values of humility, long suffering, endurance, and obedience are to be affirmed alongside self-reliance, freedom, proclamation, mission, and authority. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

What a wonderful and amazing Scheme have we here of the magnificent Vastness of the Universe! So many Suns, so many Earths, and every one of them stock'd with so many Herbs, Trees and Animals, and adorn'd with so many Seas and Mountains! And how must our wonder and admiration be encreased when we consider the prodigious distance and multitude of the Stars? — Christiaan Huygens

There are certain fundamental requisites for wise and resolute democratic leadership. It must build on hope, not on fear; on honesty, not on falsehood; on justice, not on injustice; on public tranquility, not on violence; on freedom, not on enslavement. It must weave a social fabric in which the most important strands are a devotion to truth and a commitment to righteousness. These are essential ingredients of the American way of life. They are the necessary conditions for the achievement of freedom and human progress the world over. — Edmund Ezra Day

Both the poor and the rich need salvation. At the same time, each person has his or her specific sinfulness and enslavement. The patterns of enslavement differ, which means that the specific sinfulness of the rich is different from that of the poor. Therefore, in Luke's gospel, the rich are tested on the ground of their wealth, whereas others are tested on loyalty toward their family, their people, their culture, and their work (Lk 9:59-61) (Nissen 1984:175). This means that the poor are sinners like everyone else, because ultimately sinfulness is rooted in the human heart. — David J. Bosch

I didn't find out until I became a father. You don't just LOVE your children. You FALL in love with them. — Frasier Crane

We were all imitative. We all wandered in after Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay. We were all being dashing and gallant, declaring we weren't virgins, whether we were or not. — Dorothy Parker

Human beings may well be unable to break free of the dictatorship of greed that spreads like a miasma over the world, but no longer will we be an inarticulate and ignorant humanity, confused by our enslavement to superior cruelty and weaponry. — Alice Walker

Write people's accomplishments in stone, and their faults in sand. — Sharon Armstrong

Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa's face. — William S. Burroughs

We must be courageous in speaking out on the issues that concern us:
We must not bend under the weight of spurious arguments
invoking culture or traditional values.
No value worth the name supports the oppression
and enslavement of women.
The function of culture and tradition is to provide
a framework for human well-being.
If they are used against us, we will reject them, and move on. We will not allow ourselves to be silenced. — Nafis Sadik

Writing down everything I eat makes such a difference, because you never realize how much you're consuming unless you read it later in the day. — Carrie Underwood

And it is one of the miracles of science and hygiene that the germs that used to be in our food have been replaced by poisons. — Wendell Berry

Don't you know that nobody can make you be shit? You can only let it happen. — Juxian Tang

If I do a movie where I have to have a son and it's a chubby kid, my mother is always like, 'You were never like that.' She gets so upset about it. — Kevin James

What changed at the end of the eighteenth century, therefore, was not so much the discovery of a fundamentally new concept in human relations but the emergence of a political movement universalizing what until then had been largely a local and territorial impulse. This insight helps to explain the speed of change. What is notable for our purposes is the dualistic or two-sided character of the free-air principle. On the one hand, it reflected views about what was proper in human relationships, a sense of the wrongness of enslavement. But on the other hand, it had an exclusivist side, a statement of pride in national identity, coupled with a determination to prevent established relationships from being disrupted by the — Gavin Wright

The Dutch at close proximity looked much like Americans, apart from their peculiar uniforms, and so it was their uniforms I fired at, half convinced that I was killing, not human beings, but enemy costumes, which had borne their contents here from a distant land; and if some living man suffered for his enslavement to the uniform, or was penetrated by the bullets aimed at it well, that was unavoidable, and the fault couldn't be placed at my feet. The private charade was not equivalent to Courage, but it enabled a Callousness that served a similar purpose. — Robert Charles Wilson

The enslavement, humiliation, torture, and ultimate destruction of thousands upon thousands of human beings for a project for which there was ultimately no purpose is a horror that's very hard to imagine, far less understand. — Richard Flanagan

Every time a new nation, America or Russia for instance, advances toward civilization, the human race perfects itself; every time an inferior class emerges from enslavement and degradation, the human race again perfects itself. — Madame De Stael

Religion, the dominion of the human mind;
Property, the dominion of human needs; and
Government, the dominion of human conduct,
represent the stronghold of man's enslavement
and all the horrors it entails. — Emma Goldman

Our present system is unique in world history, because over and above its physical and economic constraints, it demands of us total surrender of our souls, continuous and active participation in the general, conscious lie. To this putrefaction of the soul, this spiritual enslavement, human beings who wish to be human cannot consent. When Caesar, having exacted what is Caesar's, demands still more insistently that we render him what is God's - that is a sacrifice we dare not make! — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Here's the reality. The image of a white Jesus has been used to justify enslavement, conquest, colonialism, the genocide of indigenous peoples. There are literally millions of human beings whose lives have been snuffed out by people who conquered under the banner of a white god. — Tim Wise

It used to be said in antislavery days that a people who would tacitly consent to the enslavement of 4,000,000 human beings were incapable of being just to each other, and I believe this same rule holds with regard to the injustice practiced by men towards women. So long as all men conspire to rob women of the citizen's right to perfect equality in all the privileges and immunities of our so-called "free" government, we can not expect these same men to be capable of perfect justice to each other. — Susan B. Anthony

The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their 'vital interests' are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the 'sanctity' of human life, or the 'conscience' of the civilized world. — James A. Baldwin

In the Christian tradition, for example, the only model for faith is Jesus of Nazareth. His proclamation, one observes in the New Testament, was not particularly religious: he spoke of God, certainly, but only in relation to ordinary human life with its quotidian struggle and suffering. Nor did he speak or preach in especially religious or secretarian terms; in fact, it maybe be said that Jesus came to set the world free from enslavement to and obsession with mere (humanly made) religion. "He went about doing good" is the biblical summary of his life and mission, and no words are more moving or provocative. — Donald Spoto

If being human requires freedom, then enslavement to the cares of this world is dehumanizing. — Tony Campolo

Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor -- it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

What shall be said, then, of those who insist upon ignoring the question of slavery as not involved in this deadly feud, and maintain that the only issue is, the support of the government and the preservation of the Union? Surely, they are "fools and blind"; for it is slaveholders alone who have conspired to seize the one, and overturn the other. As long as the enslavement of a single human being is sanctioned in the land, the curse of God will rest upon it. — William Lloyd Garrison

Georges Claude made a fortune from his neon signs, but lost most of it in the 1930s with hair brained schemes to make electricity using the temperature difference between the top of the ocean and its icy depths. He almost ended his career imprisoned for life. — Bill Hammack

I've fallen. I must have slipped. Hit my head on something. I think I'm going to be sick. Everything is red. I can't get up. One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl . . . Three for a girl. I'm stuck on three, I just can't get any further. My head is thick with sounds, my mouth thick with blood. Three for a girl. I can hear the magpies - they're laughing, mocking me, a raucous cackling. A tiding. Bad tidings. I can see them now, black against the sun. Not the birds, something else. Someone's coming. Someone is speaking to me. Now look. Now look what you made me do. — Paula Hawkins