slavery

Reaching too deep into something not meant for you is full of pain. Figure out what you can have and work on that

But there__ no such thing as free. There are only different and more horrible ways to be enslaved.

The best time to do anything, get drunk, surf, run, take a walk, gamble, make love, get high, watch a movie, read a book, is on a Monday, when everyone else is at work, as their depression will heighten your celebration, of not being them.

Every man knows that slavery is a curse. Whoever denies this, his lips libel his heart.

I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.

You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.

The issue is complex, but like many matters in Sudan, it is not as complex as Khartoum would want the west to believe.

If the Baron meets with a parcel of negro ships carrying whites into slavery to work upon their plantations in a cold climate, should we therefore imagine that he intends a reflection on the present traffic in human flesh? And that, if the negroes should do so, it would be simple justice, as retaliation is the law of God! If we were to think this a reflection on any present commercial or political matter, we should be tempted to imagine, perhaps, some political ideas conveyed in every page, in every sentence of the whole. Whether such things are or are not the intentions of the Baron the reader must judge.

It should be held as an eternal truth, that what is morally wrong can never be politically right.

Once again she would arrive at a foreign place. Once again be the newcomer, an outsider, the one who did not belong. She knew from experience that she would quickly have to ingratiate herself with her new masters to avoid being rejected or, in more dire cases, punished. Then there would be the phase where she would have to sharpen her senses in order to see and hear as acutely as possible so that she could assimilate quickly all the new customs and the words most frequently used by the group she was to become a part of--so that finally, she would be judged on her own merits.

It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of those privileges.

How are you going to get revenge against dead people? Dig __m up and stake __m through the heart?___ asked myself that same question, and I think I know the answer. You destroy what they loved, and you love what they destroyed.

Somewhat paradoxically, the more that Africans and their descendants assimilated cultural materials from colonial society, the less human they became in the minds of the colonists.

Slavery's fundamental offense against human rights was not that it took liberty away (which can happen in many other situations), but that it excluded a certain category of people even from the possibility of fighting for freedom__ fight possible under tyranny, and even under the desperate conditions of modern terror (but not under any conditions of concentration-camp life). Slavery's crime against humanity did not begin when one people defeated and enslaved its enemies (though of course this was bad enough), but when slavery became an institution in which some men were "born" free and others slave, when it was forgotten that it was man who had deprived his fellow-men of freedom, and when the sanction for the crime was attributed to nature. Yet in the light of recent events it is possible to say that even slaves still belonged to some sort of human community; their labor was needed, used, and exploited, and this kept them within the pale of humanity. To be a slave was after all to have a distinctive character, a place in society__ore than the abstract nakedness of beig human and nothing but human. Not the loss of specific rights, then, but the loss of a community willing and able to guarantee any rights whatsoever, has been the calamity which has befallen ever-increasing numbers of people. Man, it turns out, can lose all so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as man, his human dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity.

I kept traveling down the road. And everywhere it was the same. What was my name, who were my people? What was I supposed to say? That my father is the president, and my mother is his slave?

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear-not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!-Incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage. Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who "didn't know what fear was," we ought always to add the flea-and put him at the head of the procession.

That is what the Slave Trade was all about. Not death from poxes and musketry and whippings and malnutrition and melancholy and suicide: death itself. For before the white men came to Guinea to strip-mine field hands. ... black people did not die ... the decedent ... took up residence in an afterworld that was in many ways indistinguishable from his former estate.

Lush, detailed, total-immersion storytelling.__irkus Review