Overseers Quotes & Sayings

Who are the oppressors? The few: the King, the capitalist, and a handful of other overseers and superintendents. Who are the oppressed? The many: the nations of the earth; the valuable personages; the workers; they that make the bread that the soft-handed and idle eat. — Mark Twain

The United States have a coffle of four millions of slaves. They are determined to keep them in this condition; and Massachusettsis one of the confederated overseers to prevent their escape. — Henry David Thoreau

It was, however, striking - in the best sense of the word - that precisely those rules that corresponded exactly to their overseers' economic interests enjoyed unconditional veneration, whereas rules for which said correspondence was less applicable were more likely to be winked at. — Thomas Mann

The sugar planter counted on an average of ten to fifteen years' work from a slave before he was driven to death, to be replaced by another fresh off the boat. Along with malnutrition, bugs and diseases could also eventually do in someone working up to eighteen hours a day. The brutality of the American Cotton Kingdom a century later could not compare to that of Saint-Domingue in the 1700s. There would be no shortage of cruel overseers in the United States, but North American slavery was not based on a business model of systematically working slaves to death in order to replace them with newly bought captives. The French sugar plantations were a charnel house. — Tom Reiss

This Prince of the Church reserved one of his rooms for cats, where overseers fed them chicken pates twice a day. When he died the overseers and cats were provided for.Cardinal Richelieu, who had dozens of cats, built a cattery at Versailles in which to house them. — Cardinal Richelieu

Even today there still exists in the South
and in certain areas of the North
the license that our society allows to unjust officials who implement their authority in the name of justice to practice injustice against minorities. Where, in the days of slavery, social license and custom placed the unbridled power of the whip in the hands of overseers and masters, today
especially in the southern half of the nation
armies of officials are clothed in uniform, invested with authority, armed with the instruments of violence and death and conditioned to believe that they can intimidate, main or kill Negroes with the same recklessness that once motivated the slaveowner. If one doubts this conclusion, let him search the records and find how rarely in any southern state a police officer has been punished for abusing a Negro. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others - the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison. — Eduardo Galeano

Under the present dispensation, the great majority of factories are little despotisms, benevolent in some cases, malevolent in others. Even where benevolence prevails, passive obedience is demanded by the workers, who are ruled by overseers, not of their own election, but appointed from above. In theory they may be the subjects of a democratic state; but in practice they spend the whole of their working lives as the subjects of a petty tyrant. — Aldous Huxley

The land free, the land free for all, land without overseers and without masters ... — Emiliano Zapata

Nelson Mandela once remarked that he befriended his jailers, those grim, khaki-clad overseers of his decades of hard labor in a limestone quarry, by "exploiting their good qualities." Asked if he believed all people were kind at their core, he responded, "There is no doubt whatsoever, provided you are able to arouse their inherent goodness." If that sounds like wishful thinking, well, he actually did it. — Marc Ian Barasch

In the greed-is-good tradition of the 'Harry Potter' and 'Twilight' movie franchises, the overseers of 'The Hunger Games' have split the last book into two films. — Richard Corliss

Harvard has played an important role in my life. I was a student, Class of 1936, and I've been on the board of overseers. My experiences there shaped who I am. — David Rockefeller

This king [Sesostris] divided the land among all Egyptians so as to give each one a quadrangle of equal size and to draw from each his revenues, by imposing a tax to be levied yearly. But everyone from whose part the river tore anything away, had to go to him to notify what had happened; he then sent overseers who had to measure out how much the land had become smaller, in order that the owner might pay on what was left, in proportion to the entire tax imposed. In this way, it appears to me, geometry originated, which passed thence to Hellas. — Herodotus

He told her that every one of her enemies, all the masters and overseers of her suffering, would be punished, if not in this world then the next, for justice may be slow and invisible, but it always renders its true verdict in the end. — Colson Whitehead

Instead, our system of "corrections" is about arm's-length revenge and retribution, all day and all night. Then its overseers wonder why people leave prison more broken than when they went in. V — Piper Kerman

God has given us a gift, Kate. He has made us the overseers to this magnificent planet." He opened his arms and gestured toward the woods. "Every tree, bird, flower, and field . . . God made them for us." She listened intently, hearing the passion in his voice. "But with such a grand gift comes great responsibility," he continued, punctuating his words by pointing his finger in the air. "We must take great care of this gift and respect it in His name. The same goes for people. We need to take care of each other." He dropped the stick on the ground. "I don't think the rest of the world has figured that out yet, Kate. — Sarah Price

He was a regular Yankee from New England. The Yankees are noted for making the most cruel overseers. — William Wells Brown

As wars dwindled to skirmishes and our strength grew, so David was able to spend less time with military commanders and more with the engineers and overseers who were fanning out throughout the land, digging cisterns, making roads, fortifying, connecting, and generally making a nation out of our scattered people. — Geraldine Brooks

A lengthy term of community service working with addicts on the outside would probably have driven the same truth home and been a hell of a lot more productive for the community. But our current criminal justice system has no provision for restorative justice, in which an offender confronts the damage they have done and tries to make it right to the people they have harmed. (I was lucky to get there on my own, with the help of the women I met.) Instead, our system of "corrections" is about arm's-length revenge and retribution, all day and all night. Then its overseers wonder why people leave prison more broken than when they went in. — Piper Kerman

She knew well the history of which they spoke because her father had been a part of it. When the military overseers of Pakistan had refused to allow the winning party in Bangladesh - then East Pakistan - to form a government, her father had put down his textbooks, left the university, and joined the fight. Hundreds of thousands, millions of deaths later, Bangladesh had its independence. His stories had made a deep impact on on Asma as a child. She had resolved to be as brave, only to learn that as a woman she wasn't expected to be. — Amy Waldman

The masters and overseers were so good at employee development, in their absence, the employees still achieved the company's mission — Darnell Lamont Walker

toddler named Huey Newton was spirited from Monroe to Oakland with his sharecropper parents in 1943. His father had barely escaped a lynching in Louisiana for talking back to his white overseers. Huey Newton would become perhaps the most militant of the disillusioned offspring of the Great Migration. — Isabel Wilkerson

In countries operating a largely capitalist system, there does not appear to be a wide understanding among its actors and overseers of either its advantages or its hazards. — Edmund Phelps

The idea that blacks, or anyone for that matter, need the government to get ahead in life is despicable. And even more important, this idea is a failure. Our communities are just as poor as they've always been. Our schools continue to fail children. Our prisons are filled with young black men who should be at home being fathers. Our self-initiative and our self-reliance have been sacrificed in exchange for allegiance to our overseers who control us by making us dependent on them. — Elbert Guillory

I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Slaves were expected to sing as well as to work. A silent slave was not liked, either by masters or overseers. — Frederick Douglass

In addition to working as hard as men, women and girls were susceptible to sexual exploitation in ways and at rates that did not apply to men (the subject of males as victims of sexual assault has received little scholarly attention, with the exception of lynching and its attendant castration ritual). Absentee owners had to rely on managers and overseers, both white and black, who viewed sexual access as their right. Many enslaved children resulted from these unions; the question of how these interactions should be understood is a matter of debate. The rewards of voluntary cooperation could have included — Michael A. Gomez

Offerings to propitiate the dead then were regarded as belonging to the class of funeral sacrifices, and these are idolatry. Idolatry, in fact, is a sort of homage to the departed, the one as well as the other is a service to dead men. Moreover, demons dwell in the images of the dead ... this sort of exhibition has passed from honors of the dead to honors of the living; I mean, to quaestorships [financial overseers]and magistractes, to priestly offices of different kinds. Yet, since idolatry still cleaves to the dignity's name, whatever is done in its name partakes of its impurity. — Tertullian

There may be little room for the display of this supreme qualification in the retail book business, but there is room for some. Be enterprising. Get good people about you. Make your shop windows and your shops attractive. The fact that so many young men and women enter the teaching profession shows that there are still some people willing to scrape along on comparatively little money for the pleasure of following an occupation in which they delight. It is as true to-day as it was in Chaucer's time that there is a class of men who "gladly learn and gladly teach," and our college trustees and overseers and rich alumni take advantage of this and expect them to live on wages which an expert chauffeur would regard as insufficient. Any bookshop worthy of survival can offer inducements at least as great as the average school or college. Under pleasant conditions you will meet pleasant people, for the most part, whom you can teach and form whom you may learn something. — A. Edward Newton

It's clear the CIA was trying to play 'keep away' with documents relevant to an investigation by their overseers in Congress, and that's a serious constitutional concern. But it's equally if not more concerning that we're seeing another 'Merkel Effect,' where an elected official does not care at all that the rights of millions of ordinary citizens are violated by our spies, but suddenly it's a scandal when a politician finds out the same thing happens to them. — Edward Snowden

When she reached the other two overseers, she let them see her, let them try to draw their blades. She knew it wasn't the weapon in her hands that made them stupid with panic, but rather her eyes - eyes that told them they had been tricked these past few months, that cutting her hair and whipping her hadn't been enough, that she had been baiting them into forgetting that Adarlan's Assassin was in their midst. But — Sarah J. Maas

The gospel of licentiousness, of selfishness, of blaming all the difficulties of life on external factors - these are the things that are killing people today in ways that the slave whips and the overseers couldn't. — Alan Keyes

Blues for me is having things not go your way - life, love, job, money, ... It is not about the oppression of my ancestors, who were trying to get back at the overseers. Blues is different for my generation. — Robert Cray

And be careful of this, that each day at your meals you have two overseers over your household when you sit at meals, and of this be sure, that you shall be very much feared and reverenced. — Robert Grosseteste

I will watch over My flock by night (Isaiah 27:3). Behold, I have appointed My ministers as your watchmen, as overseers who watch for your souls (Hebrews 13:17; Acts 20:28) — Joseph Alleine