Stephen Ambrose Quotes

The story of our inferiority is an old dodge, as I have said; for wherever men oppress their fellows, wherever they enslave them, they will endeavor to find the needed apology for such enslavement and oppression in the character of the people oppressed and enslaved

How many, even of the better sort, would choose to be slaves to those above them, provided they might exercise an arbitrary and tyrannical rule over all below them?

Some people are by nature slaves and will always be so.

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn't want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.

African slaves, the substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it.

I am a firm believer in slavery.

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.

Racism is a way to gain economic advantage at the expense of others. Slavery and plantations may be gone, but racism still allows us to regard those who may keep us from financial gain as less than equals.

When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior.

Slavery is the first step towards civilization. In order to develop it is necessary that things should be much better for some and much worse for others, then those who are better off can develop at the expense of others.

To hold a people in oppression you have to convince them first that they are supposed to be oppressed.

Those who oppressed us described us as the Dark Continent!

The right to have a slave implies the right in some one to make the slave; that right must be equal and mutual, and this would resolve society into a state of perpetual war.

This is just what I have thought when I have seen slaves at work - they seem to go through the motions of labor without putting strength into them. They keep their powers in reserve for their own use at night, perhaps.

Africa suffered under European dominance for centuries.

Race is not particularly interesting to me. Power is. Who has power and who doesn't. Slavery interests me because it's an incredible violation that has not stopped. It's necessary to talk about that. Race is a diversion.

The purposeful restriction of knowledge has been at the heart of untold misery and hardship in this world. Serfs were kept illiterate so as to not jeopardize the feudal system. Slaves were kept in the dark on a variety of subjects so as to not provide them the possibility of escape.

It is bad to have a servant, but worse to have a master.

A Sudra [lowest caste untouchable], though emancipated by his master, is not released from servitude; since that is innate in him, who can set him free from it?

It is not right that a servile race should inhabit the same locality which their ancestors inhabited in power and glory.

We first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate.

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

That’s a slave talking.

The natural course of power is to make the many slaves to the few.

So long as the slave remains ignorant and docile and contented he is taken care of, humored and spoken of with a contemptuous, compassionate kindness. But from the moment he exhibits the attributes of a rational being, from the moment his intellect seems likely to come into the most distant competition with that of whites, the most deadly hatred springs up—not in the black, but in his oppressors.