Lauren DeStefano Quotes

Slavery doesn't have any positives.

My definition of slavery is the deprivation of human volition, any form of relationship between two peoples which is based on the deprivation of volition of one side.

Beat and cuff your slave, keep him hungry and spiritless, and he will follow the chain of his master like a dog. Feed and clothe him well, work him moderately, surround him with physical comfort and dreams of freedom intrude.

Notwithstanding my grandmother's long and faithful service to her owners, not one of her children escaped the auction block. These God-breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend.

Slavery is ...an atrocious debasement of human nature.

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.

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

People can be slave-ships in shoes.

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.

This is about slavery.

That’s a slave talking.

Slavery is the cause of treason and sustains it everywhere it exists.

Torture was necessary to maintain slavery. It was integral to slavery. You cannot have slavery without some torture or the threat of torture; and you cannot have torture without slavery. You cannot imprison a free man forever unless you have broken him; and you can only forcibly break a man's soul by torturing it out of him. Slavery dehumanizes; torture dehumanizes in exactly the same way. The torture of human beings who have no freedom and no recourse to the courts is slavery.

If you will have a person enslaved, the first thing you must do is convince yourself that the person is subhuman. The second thing you have to do is convince your allies so you'll have some help, and the third and probably unkindest cut of all is to convince that person that he or she is subhuman and deserves it.

I am a firm believer in slavery.

The slave child had no thought for the morrow; but there came that blight, which too surely waits on every human being born to be a chattel.

The Southern newspapers, with their advertisements of negro sales and personal descriptions of fugitive slaves, supply details of misery that it would be difficult for imagination to exceed. Scorn, derision, insult, menace - the handcuff, the last - the tearing away of children from parents, of husbands from wives - the weary trudging in droves along the common highways, the labor of body, the despair of mind, the sickness of heart - these are the realities which belong to the system, and form the rule, rather that the exception, in the slave's experience.

We stole their babes and mothers, chiefs and braves Although we held the whip, you knew we were The real slaves To alchemy, human alchemy.

When I have been travelling up and down on our boats, or about on my collecting tours, and reflected that every brutal, disgusting, mean, low-lived fellow I met, was allowed by our laws to become absolute despot of as many men, women and children, as he could cheat, steal, or gamble money enough to buy,-when I have seen such men in actual ownership of helpless children, of young girls and women,-I have been ready to curse my country, to curse the human race!

However you disguise slavery, it is slavery still. Its chains, though wreathed with roses, not only fasten on the body but rivet on the mind.

Slavery is now nowhere more patiently endured, than in countries once inhabited by the zealots of liberty.

Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.

In most ages many countries have had part of their inhabitants in a state of slavery; yet it may be doubted whether slavery can ever be supposed the natural condition of man. It is impossible not to conceive that men in their original state were equal; and very difficult to imagine how one would be subjected to another but by violent compulsion. An individual may, indeed, forfeit his liberty by a crime; but he cannot by that crime forfeit the liberty of his children.

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

Experience proves that those are oftenest abused who can be abused with the greatest impunity. Men are whipped oftenest who are whipped easiest.