Octavia E. Butler Quotes

The poor North has much to do with slavery. It staggers under its load and smarts under its lash.

I'm the descendant of enslaved black people in this country. You could've been born in 1820 if you were black and looked back to your ancestors and saw nothing but slaves all the way back to 1619. Look forward another 50 or 60 years and saw nothing but slaves.

The truth that we are required to face about the slave trade is that it was founded on violence and terror … not done to Americans but done by Americans to others.

The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.

Slavery, our country's original sin, sat on a foundation codified by laws enforced by police, by slave-catchers.

You have a plantation where you have 10 white people and you have about 50 or 60 black people. The automatic thought was, 'Why didn't they raise up? Why didn't they overpower? They had the numbers.' But really these people, their hope was broken. Their sense of love was broken. Their appreciation for who they were was broken.

Slavery is malignantly aristocratic.

God knows I detest slavery but it is an existing evil, and we must endure it and give it such protection as is guaranteed by the Constitution.

Slavery exists. It is black in the South, and white in the North.

The challenges African-Americans are facing today are rooted in the system of slavery.

It comes down to this: black people were stripped of our identities when we were brought here, and it's been a quest since then to define who we are.

Why is Slavery so much condemn'd and strove against in one Case, and so highly applauded and held so necessary and so sacred in another?

The prolonged slavery of women is the darkest page in human history.

Slavery was the betrayal of the American Promise at the moment that promise was made.

The Soul of man is made an article of merchandize by his fellow man and can such a land be happy? No! Happyness does not dwell in any land that is scard by the blighting curse of Slavery.

What slavery really demonstrated was that we don't really know how to use energy wisely and that we can be incredibly abusive and barbaric.

I am amazed at the facility with which some men follow in the wake of slavery.

Was it not enough punishment and suffering in history that we were uprooted and made helpless slaves not only in new colonial outposts but also domestically.

The slaves had food stamps, too. It was called 'scraps from Massa's table.'

The poor despise labor when performed by slaves.

I can speak of slavery only so far as it came under my own observation - only so far as I have known and experienced it in my own person.

The state of slavery is in its own nature bad.

Eight generations of African-Americans are still waiting to achieve their rights - compensation and restitution for the hundreds of years during which they were bought and sold on the market.

Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is the symbolic saga of a people.

Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil.