Alex Haley Quotes

It surprises people that there's actually a very large number of slaves in the world today-our best estimate is 27 million. And that is defining a slave in a very narrow way; we're not talking about sweatshop workers or people who are just poor, we're talking about people who are controlled by violence, who cannot walk away, who are being held against their will, who are being paid nothing.

Slavery is a condition imposed upon individuals or races not sufficiently able to protect or defend themselves, and so long as a race or people expose themselves to the danger of being weak, no one can tell when they will be reduced to slavery.

[Puggles] "What population signs on willingly for slavery?" "You mean other than wives?" [Glinda]

In antiquity slaves were, in all honesty called slaves. In the middle ages, they took the name of serfs. Nowadays they are called wage earners.

Slavery is the ultimate and greatest evil. For it is based on a denial of the dignity of the human soul.

Modern slavery - be it bonded labor, involuntary servitude, or sexual slavery - is a crime and cannot be tolerated in any culture, community, or country ... [It] is an affront to our values and our commitment to human rights.

I can recollect no one place at present from whence the cotton can come, but from the labour of the slaves

The draft should be called slavery, involuntary servitude.

I have known men who have been sold and bought a hundred times, who have only got very fat and very comfortable in the process of exchange.

Slavery is theft - theft of a life, theft of work, theft of any property or produce, theft even of the children a slave might have borne.

There are more than 27 million people enslaved in the world today - that's double the amount of people taken from Africa during the entire trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Though no one would want to be sold as a slave, it is perhaps even more galling to be a sort of utility slave whom no one will buy.

We've got some new ways to make slaves here.

In the form of security and sufficiency for the men who labor to the profit of others, and in the form of registering and controlling them in the form of an organized public supervision of their labor, slavery is already afoot. When slavery shall succeed it will succeed through the acquiescence of those who will be enslaved, for they will prefer sufficiency and security with enslavement, to freedom, responsibility, insecurity and the threat of insufficiency.

Enslavement is when one person completely controls another person, uses violence or violent threats to maintain that control, exploits them economically, and pays them effectively nothing. Trafficking in persons is a process of enslaving someone.

Slavery is what slavery's always been: About one person controlling another person using violence and then exploiting them economically, paying them nothing. That's what slavery's about

I'm so sick and tired of hearing about slavery. You think slavery didn't exist in Africa? Even Indian tribes.

African slavery, as it exists in the United States, is a moral, a social, and a political blessing.

There are more slaves alive today than all the people stolen from Africa in the time of the transatlantic slave trade. Put another way, today's slave population is greater than the population of Canada, and six times greater than the population of Israel.

Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone.

Slavery can never be abolished.

When people think of slavery, they think of an era from the distant past. Grainy photographs from Civil War times. And yet it goes on.

People-trafficking is modern day slavery. There are more slaves today than there were at the height of the slave trade.

Modern slavery is a hidden crime and notoriously difficult to measure.