Born Into Slavery Quotes

#1. Maybe it's ALWAYS the end of the world. Maybe you're alive for a while, and then you realize you're going to die, and that's such an insane thing to comprehend, you look around for answers and the only answer is that the world must die with you.

Sure, the world seems crazy now. But wouldn't it seem just as crazy if you were alive when they sacrificed peasants, when people were born into slavery, when they killed first-born sons, crucified priests, fed people to lions, burned them on stakes, when they intentionally gave people smallpox or syphilis, when they gassed them, burned them, dropped atomic bombs on them, when entire races tried to wipe other races off the planet?

Yes, we've ruined the planet and melted the ice caps and depleted the ozone, and we're always finding new ways to kill one another. Yeah, we're getting cancer at an alarming rate and suicides are at an all-time high, and, sure, we've got people so depressed they take a drug that could turn them into pasty-skinned animals who go around all night dancing and having sex and eating stray cats and small dogs and squirrels and mice and very, very rarely- the statistics say you're more likely to be killed by lightning- a person.

But this is the Apocalypse? Fuck you! It's always the Apocalypse. The world hasn't gone to shit. The world is shit.

All I'd asked was that it be better managed. #Quote by Jess Walter

#2. There are three ways in which a man becomes a slave. He may be born into slavery, or forced into it, or he can deliberately accept his servitude. All three forms flourish in the modern world. Men are born and forced into slavery in Russia and her satellites states. Men in the free world invite slavery when they ask the government to provide complete security, when they surrender their freedom to the "Welfare State." #Quote by Fulton J. Sheen

#3. Debt Chauffeur, that's my name for him now, wants to marry me. He asked me down on bended knee, and I would have been honored - except he wants us to live in London, and he wants me to live white. I crowed at that. I laughed so hard and not a tear came. He couldn't understand it. I don't often think on how white I look; it's always been a question of how colored I feel, and I feel plenty colored. He said that no one in London will know that I'm supposed to be colored. And I said I am colored, colored black, the way I talk, the way I cook, the way I do most everything, and he said but you don't have to be. #Quote by Alice Randall

#4. What will our children be like ? A lot depends on us. But it's up to them as well. What must be alive in them is a striving for freedom. That depends on us. People who have been born into slavery find it hard to lose the habit. #Quote by Andrei Tarkovsky

#5. We have not thoroughly assessed the bodies snatched from dirt and sand to be chained in a cell. We have not reckoned with the horrendous, violent mass kidnapping that we call the Middle Passage.

We have not been honest about all of America's complicity - about the wealth the South earned on the backs of the enslaved, or the wealth the North gained through the production of enslaved hands. We have not fully understood the status symbol that owning bodies offered. We have not confronted the humanity, the emotions, the heartbeats of the multiple generations who were born into slavery and died in it, who never tasted freedom on America's land.

The same goes for the Civil War. We have refused to honestly confront the fact that so many were willing to die in order to hold the freedom of others in their hands. We have refused to acknowledge slavery's role at all, preferring to boil things down to the far more palatable "state's rights." We have not confessed that the end of slavery was so bitterly resented, the rise of Jim Crow became inevitable - and with it, a belief in Black inferiority that lives on in hearts and minds today.

We have painted the hundred-year history of Jim Crow as little more than mean signage and the inconvenience that white people and Black people could not drink from the same fountain. But those signs weren't just "mean". They were perpetual reminders of the swift humiliation and brutal violence that could be suffered at any m #Quote by Austin Channing Brown

#6. Ah, my dear friend, cheer up... After all, we have peace! And because there is peace, the occupiers can't behave so abominably anymore. All right, we're not free. But we are used to that, Mr. Kujawski. After all we were both born into slavery, and we will die in it. Oh yes, at first they'll exploit us ruthlessly. Fourteen hours of slave labor a day. A bowl of watery soup. Whippings, beatings... But that will pass with time. Because there is peace, they won't have a chance to get any new slaves. They'll have to take good care of those have already. Cheer up, dear Mr. Kujawski... [...] Arbeit macht frei, work makes man free, and it makes him especially so in the sunshine of European peace. We will lack only one thing. Only one! The right of dissent. The right to say out loud that we want a free and independent Poland, that we want to brush our teeth and go on holiday in our own way, conceive children and work our own way, think in our own way, live and die. This is the one thing you will find missing in the sunshine of European peace, which you, my friend, hold to be the highest good. #Quote by Andrzej Szczypiorski

#7. Oh," said Alex quietly, remembering her manners and falling into a curtsy, "apologies, my lord, your new title slipped my mind." Gavin turned back toward Alex, surprised. "No need to stand on ceremony, Alex. I forget that I'm the earl myself most of the time. I cannot seem to get comfortable with the idea that I carry the title now. Besides, I don't see how it would change much. Nick has been an earl your whole life and that doesn't seem to change the way you treat him." He shot her an odd smile and nodded in the direction of Alex's middle brother. Nick, as always, was quick to chime in. "That's right! You lot have never respected my title," he said, puffing out his chest in a false air of pompousness. He added a thickly arrogant tenor to his blustering. "Why should Blackmoor get any respect? I've been the Earl of Farrow since before you were born and it doesn't earn me an ounce of esteem!" Everyone laughed and, with that, the awkwardness of the situation had disappeared. #Quote by Sarah MacLean

#8. The film 'Documented,' a project of the nonprofit and nonpartisan Define American campaign, is about my families: the family I was blessed to be born into, and the family of friends, mentors and allies that I found when I moved to the United States at 12, a Filipino kid trying to make sense of my new home in America. #Quote by Jose Antonio Vargas

#9. Love develops into harmony, and of harmony is born beauty. #Quote by Hazrat Inayat Khan

#10. The continuing, direct operation of the Holy Ghost on those who are called to be God's children implies, in fact, a broadening process of incarnation. Christ, the son begotten by God, is the first-born who is succeeded by an ever-increasing number of younger brothers and sisters. There are, however, neither begotten by the Holy Ghost nor born of a virgin ... Their lowly origin (possibly from the mammals) does not prevent them from entering into a close kinship with God as their father and Christ as their brother. #Quote by Carl Jung

#11. The cloudy weather melts at length into beauty, and the brightest smiles of the heart are born of its tears. #Quote by Hosea Ballou

#12. Kera came out of another room, dragging an unhappy Vig Rundstom behind her.
The two Crows pushed the men together until they faced each other, barely inches apart, neither man willing to look at the other.
By Tyr's mssing hand, how had Ski gotten into this?
"Well?" Jace pushed.
"Well what?"
"For me. Please."
"Stop saying that!" Ski let out a very angry but resigned breath. He looked directly at Rundstom and snarled, "Thank you for saving my life."
The Raven stared at Ski a moment before bellowing,
"Now you owe your soul to me!"
Luvig Rundstom!" Kera yelled before Ski could punch the bastard in the face. "You promised!"
"He does owe his soul to me. It's a blood oath!"
"So you're telling your half-black girlfriend that you're into slavery?"
"No. Of course not."
"Then do it right," she bit out between clenched teeth.
It took the Raven a moment, lips in a tight line, unwilling to open to say the next words. But he finally relented under the withering glare of his girlfriend. "You're welcome."
"See?" Kera asked. "that wasn't so hard, now, was it? #Quote by Shelly Laurenston

#13. You say rightly that I am a king. For this cause I was born, and for this cause I have come into the world. [John 18:37] #Quote by Anonymous

#14. Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last. #Quote by Marisha Pessl

#15. Writers are a combative bunch when it comes to aesthetics, and the generation before GENRE are born into a discourse that's been brewing since Cervantes. #Quote by Hal Duncan

#16. Him & Her are born directly from the ideas behind the Panton Chair. An evolution of the hermaphroditic original, declined into the harmony of the two sexes. They assume sculpted forms like naked models of seduction ... but they feel no shame. #Quote by Fabio Novembre

#17. I believe in art the way other people believe in god. I say that because books and paintings and music and photography gave me an alternate world to inhabit when the one I was born into was a dead zone. I say it because if you, even inside whatever terror itches your skin, pick up a pen or a paintbrush, a camera or clay or a guitar, you already have what you are afraid to choose. Volition. It was already in you. #Quote by Lidia Yuknavitch

#18. Bob and I talked occasionally about the Church and religion, and once both expressed our amazement that we had somehow been born into the one group of people who were living as true Christians should. After all, we could just as easily have been born into a family that watched TV or, heaven forbid, into a family of Baptists! #Quote by Craig A. Hart

#19. We teach girls shame. Close your legs; cover yourself. We make them feel as though being born female, they're already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And they grow up
and this is the worst thing we do to girls
they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form. #Quote by Chimamamda Ngozi Adichie

#20. Your way begins at the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now. #Quote by Rumi

#21. I think I was born into an incredibly fortunate environment. #Quote by Arpad Busson

#22. Ego Tripping

I was born in the congo
I walked to the fertile crescent and built
the sphinx
I designed a pyramid so tough that a star
that only glows every one hundred years falls
into the center giving divine perfect light
I am bad

I sat on the throne
drinking nectar with allah
I got hot and sent an ice age to europe
to cool my thirst
My oldest daughter is nefertiti
the tears from my birth pains
created the nile
I am a beautiful woman

I gazed on the forest and burned
out the sahara desert
with a packet of goat's meat
and a change of clothes
I crossed it in two hours
I am a gazelle so swift
so swift you can't catch me

For a birthday present when he was three
I gave my son hannibal an elephant
He gave me rome for mother's day
My strength flows ever on

My son noah built new/ark and
I stood proudly at the helm
as we sailed on a soft summer day
I turned myself into myself and was
jesus
men intone my loving name
All praises All praises
I am the one who would save

I sowed diamonds in my back yard
My bowels deliver uranium
the filings from my fingernails are
semi-precious jewels
On a trip north
I caught a cold and blew
My nose giving oil to the arab world
I am so hip even my errors are correct
I sailed west to reach e #Quote by Nikki Giovanni

#23. In the cage is the lion. She paces with her memories. Her body is a record of her past. As she moves back and forth, one may see it all: the lean frame, the muscular legs, the paw enclosing long sharp claws, the astonishing speed of her response. She was born in this garden. She has never in her life stretched those legs. Never darted farther than twenty yards at a time. Only once did she use her claws. Only once did she feel them sink into flesh. And it was her keeper's flesh. Her keeper whom she loves, who feeds her, who would never dream of harming her, who protects her. Who in his mercy forgave her mad attack, saying this was in her nature, to be cruel at a whim, to try to kill what she loves. He had come into her cage as he usually did early in the morning to change her water, always at the same time of day, in the same manner, speaking softly to her, careful to make no sudden movement, keeping his distance, when suddenly she sank down, deep down into herself, the way wild animals do before they spring, and then she had risen on all her strong legs, and swiped him in one long, powerful, graceful movement across the arm. How lucky for her he survived the blow. The keeper and his friends shot her with a gun to make her sleep. Through her half-open lids she knew they made movements around her. They fed her with tubes. They observed her. They wrote comments in notebooks. And finally they rendered a judgment. She was normal. She was a normal wild beast, whose power is dangero #Quote by Susan Griffin

#24. Every child born into the world has a divine mission to fulfill. #Quote by Lailah Gifty Akita

#25. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men's pain that I carried my cross. #Quote by Shusaku Endo

#26. Why must it be so hard
For us to come to understand,
That there are things we cannot change
Hidden amongst the things we can?
For we can rearrange our hearts,
Dust out the corners of our minds,
We can teach our eyes to see
Only the things we wish to find.
Yet once we decorate our walls
And sweep our sorrows off the floor,
Why do we look to someone else,
To show us how we can be more?
For here is where the line
Between our can and can't gets tough,
Just the point at which we all must learn
That we are already enough,
That since we cannot choose the home,
Our only soul was born into,
We should rearrange its rooms
But learn to love its window's view. #Quote by Erin Hanson

#27. I am happy to say that there is nothing to report." The guard's voice grew muffled as he bent to shrug off his armor. "Save that I now know every path and stream in this village as though I were born here and had never set foot outside it, and have counted all the leaves on all the trees and found them in good health and order, and have taken the liberty of naming all the frogs down by the creek, placing them into clans by the markings on their back and taking for myself the title King and Overlord of all Frog-Kind. #Quote by Matthew Jobin

#28. of all things, the greatest, and most important, and most all-embracing, is this society in which human beings and God are associated together. From this are derived the generative forces to which not only my father and grandfather owe their origin, but also all beings that are born and grow on the earth, and especially rational beings, [5] since they alone are fitted by nature to enter into communion with the divine, being bound to God through reason. #Quote by Epictetus

#29. I see the potential for a new world being born in front of me and all around me, and I feel the only way to bring that potential into being is to know myself. #Quote by Gary Zukav

#30. I've seen definitive change in the mountains. I have concerns for the future generation. We inherit the earth from the people in front of us, and then we pass it on to the next generation. I don't think we've done a great job with our responsibility to leave the earth a better place than what we were born into. #Quote by Jeremy Jones

#31. We in this room have no private properties. Perhaps one or two of us may own the homes we live in, or have a dollar or two set aside - but we own nothing that does not contribute directly toward keeping us alive. All that we own is our bodies. And we sell our bodies every day we live. We sell them when we go out in the morning to our jobs and when we labor all day. We are forced to sell at any price, at any time, for any purpose. We are forced to sell our bodies so that we can eat and live. And the price which is given us for this is only enough so that we will have the strength to labor longer for the profits of others. Today we are not put up on platforms and sold at the courthouse square. But we are forced to sell our strength, our time, our souls during almost every hour that we live. We have been freed from one kind of slavery only to be delivered into another. Is this freedom? Are we yet free men? #Quote by Carson McCullers

#32. Trust is a beautiful form of love. When we are generous, we give money, time, knowledge. In trust, we give ourselves. But we can only give of ourselves if we trust that we will be well received by someone. At what moment is trust born? There was a secret moment, known only to Claudia, when she recognized that she was loved. With that realization, Claudia entered into a relationship of belonging. The opening of Claudia's heart brought about a new opening in Nadine's heart, bringing her out of her own loneliness. That moment was the birth of communion between them. #Quote by Jean Vanier

#33. A leopard doesn't change his spots just because you bring him in from the jungle and try to housebreak him and turn him into a pet. He may learn to sheathe his claws in order to beg a few scraps off the dinner table, and you may teach him to be a beast of burden, but it doesn't pay to forget that he'll al ways be what he was born: a wild animal. #Quote by George Lincoln Rockwell

#34. The truth is that we are the embodiment of Life, we are born into this world as a result of a miracle, and later we are lost amidst the multitude of teachings and dogmas. After identifying with our beliefs and convinctions we forget who we really are, who the person born in us into the world in order to experience existence and get acquainted with all the teachings. #Quote by Frank M. Wanderer

#35. We got pregnant with Angel almost by accident. I was thinking it was just about time to go on birth control and wham-it happened. We wanted two children, but were thinking of spacing them out a little more. God and Angel had other plans.
I'm so glad. Bubba and Angel are so close in age and such good friends that I can't imagine it any other way. But at the time, I was more than a little apprehensive about it. Once again, it worked out that Chris was preparing to leave just when I was due.
They say God only gives you what you can handle. Chris didn't cope with crying babies very well. So either he paid the military to deploy him with each baby, or God was looking out for him with well-timed, newborn-avoiding deployments.
This time, the Team guy karma worked: the sonogram technician confirmed it was a girl several months into the pregnancy. She was going to be the first female born into the Kyle side of the family in eighty years. Which made her unique, and her grandparents particularly tickled.
Chris couldn't resist the opportunity to tease them with the news.
"We're having a boy," he said when he called them back in Texas with the news.
"Oh, how nice," they said.
"No, we're having a girl."
"Whoo-hoo!" they shouted.
"No, we're having a boy."
"Chris! Which is it!?"
"A girl!"
If they could have gotten away to visit us that night, I doubt they would have needed an airplane to fly. #Quote by Taya Kyle

#36. The Irishman frees himself from slavery when he realizes the truth that the capitalist system is the most foreign thing in Ireland. The Irish question is a social question. The whole age-long fight of the Irish people against their oppressors resolves itself in the last analysis into a fight for the mastery of the means of life, the sources of production, in Ireland. Who would own and control the land? The people, or the invaders; and if the invaders, which set of them - the most recent swarm of land thieves, or the sons of the thieves of a former generation? #Quote by James Connolly

#37. My lessons from my mother's life are many, but one that stings the most and the one I want to imbue in my heart is to not judge people negatively by how they act, even if they look normal, or have been normal in your past, because you never know what they have to fight inside - something they never chose to have.
The answer to Dustin walking was not willpower. He was not born to walk, and while trying made us better people, more practice wasn't the answer - compassion was. The answer to the feeling that I was losing my mother slowly over the years was not to try to motivate her into a new perspective to magically fix all the problems - it was love. #Quote by Darcy Leech

#38. In one of those mythic remarks of uncertain authorship, Michael Faraday is alleged to have been asked what was the use of science. 'Sir,' Faraday replied. 'Of what use is a new-born child?' The obvious thing for Faraday (or Benjamin Franklin, or whoever it was) to have meant was that a baby might be no use for anything at present, but it has great potential for the future. I now like to think that he meant something else, too: What is the use of bringing a baby into the world if the only thing it does with its life is just work to go on living? If everything is judged by how 'useful' it is - useful for staying alive, that is - we are left facing a futile circularity. There must be some added value. At least a part of life should be devoted to living that life, not just working to stop it ending. #Quote by Richard Dawkins

#39. When evening comes, I return to my home, and I go into my study; and on the thresh-hold, I take off my everyday clothes, which are covered in mud and mire,and I put on regal and curial robes; and dressed in a more appropriate manner I enter into the ancient courts of ancient men and am welcomed by them kindly, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born; and there I am not ashamed to speak to them, to ask them the reasons for their actions; and they, in their humanity, answer me; and for four hours I feel no boredom,I dismiss every affliction, I no longer fear poverty nor do I tremble at the thought of death; I become completely part of them. #Quote by Niccolo Machiavelli

#40. You can become all God created you to be even if you've had difficulties, even if you weren't born into a good, loving family, God still has a plan for your life. #Quote by Joel Osteen

#41. At first the creative mind submits to its entry into the symbolic register and gets itself structured like everyone else. Then he balks at a fateful moment which becomes a turning point in the history of his mental growth. From the entry into the imaginary order where he acknowledges his ego and then to the symbolic order where he recognizes his place in the society and finally in his de-symbolization or a refusal to obey the Law that is the rules of the world of symbols, a creative genius is born. #Quote by Anuradha Bhattacharyya

#42. I'm born into the cycle of giving that we're all born into, and I recognize it. So just because something is a good business, I'm not a business guy. I'm a creative guy. #Quote by Russell Simmons

#43. A man who has been born into the house of a warrior and yet places no loyalty in his heart and thinks only of the fortune of his position will be flattering on the surface and construct schemes in his heart, will forsake righteousness and not reflect on his shame, and will stain the warrior's name of his household to later generations. This is truly regrettable. #Quote by Torii Mototada