William Cowper Quotes

Poverty and slavery are thus only two forms ofthe same thing, the essence of which is that a man's energies are expended for the most part not on his own behalf but on that of others.

Slavery, properly so called, is the establishment of a right which gives to one man such a power over another as renders him absolute master of his life and fortune.

If you look at slavery across all human history, and you sort of strip away the packaging, whether it's racialized or religious-based, and you look at the actual core of the slavery, it's one person completely controlling another one.

Would you rather lead an army of slaves?

A well-paid slave is nonetheless a slave.

Where there is a man who does not labor because another is compelled to work for him, there slavery is.

Base is the slave that pays.

Slavery is malignantly aristocratic.

The first, and overarching, count in the new indictment is that slavery permitted one group of people to exercise unrestrained personal domination over another group of people.

Slavery takes hold of few, but many take hold of slavery.

They would make fine servants .... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

Inasmuch as great wealth is an instrument which is uniformly used to extort from others their property, it ought to be taken away from its possessor, on the same principle that a sword or a pistol may be wrested from a robber, who shall undertake to accomplish the same effect in a different manner.

I protest against the fitness and truth of the usually received definitions and applications of "slave labor" and "free labor"--and, in contradiction thereto, maintain that, in proportion to the respective populations, there are many more slaves in England, and in very much more suffering and painful conditions, than in all the negro slaveholding States of this Confederation.

Among the most oppressive measures, and the ones most deeply harming society, is the compelling of subjects to perform forced work unjustly.

The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery.

Slavery, you know, is nothing else than the unwilling labor of many. Therefore to get rid of slavery it is necessary that people should not wish to profit by the forced labor of others and should consider it a sin and a shame. But they go and abolish the external form of slavery and arrange so that one can no longer buy and sell slaves, and they imagine and assure themselves that slavery no longer exists, and do not see or wish to see that it does, because people still want and consider it good and right to exploit the labor of others.

There are a few men whom slavery holds fast, but there are many more who hold fast to slavery.

As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America. Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. … Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance.

This is what it means to be a slave; to be abused and bear it; compelled by violence to suffer wrong.

Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment.

Some slaves are scoured to their work by whips, others by their restlessness and ambition.

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

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.

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

People can be slave-ships in shoes.