Slave Trade Quotes

“I had chosen freedom, with all its insecurities, and nothing in the world would make me turn away from it.”
― Lawrence Hill, The Book of Negroes

“I would have to confess that in the land of the toubabu, I had managed to save only myself.”
― Lawrence Hill, The Book of Negroes

“Older forms of indentured servanthood and the bond-service of biblical times had often been harsh, but Christian abolitionists concluded that race-based, life-long chattel slavery, established through kidnapping, could not be squared with biblical teaching either in the Old Testament or the New.”
― Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism

“That's going to be my last trip. This trading in n***ers is a bad business for a fellow that's got any heart.”
― Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

“Some say that because the United States was wrong before, it cannot possibly be right now, or has not the right to be right. (The British Empire sent a fleet to Africa and the Caribbean to maintain the slave trade while the very same empire later sent another fleet to enforce abolition. I would not have opposed the second policy because of my objections to the first; rather it seems to me that the second policy was morally necessitated by its predecessor.)”
― Christopher Hitchens, A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq

“Could it possible for humans to breath under water? A fetus in its mother's womb is certainly alive in an aquatic environment. During the greatest holocaust the world has ever known, pregnant America-bound African slaves were thrown overboard by the thousands during labor for being sick and disruptive cargo. Is it possible that they could have given birth at sea to babies that never needed air. Are Drexians water-breathing, aquatically-mutated descendants of those unfortunate victims of human greed? Have they been spared by god to teach us or terrorize us? Their stories took one of the most gruesome details of the Atlantic slave trade and reframed it. The murder of enslaved women was reimagined as an escape from murderous oppression and the founding of a utopia civilization.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“society has an embarrassing history of denial”
― Carolyn Spring, Living with the Reality of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Campaigning Voices

“There is no question that the Deep South seceded and fought the civil war to defend slavery. And its leaders made no secret of this motive. Slavery they argued Ad nauseam was the foundation for a virtuous biblically sanctioned social system superior to that of the free states. When 19th century deep southerners spoke of defending their “traditions”, “heritage”, and way of life they proudly identified the enslavement of others as the center piece of all three. Indeed, many of their leaders even argued that all lower class people should be enslaved regardless of race for their own good.
In response to Yankee and midland abolitionist the Deep South’s leaders developed an elaborate defense for human bondage. James Henry Hammond, former governor of South Carolina, published a seminal book arguing that enslaved laborers where happier, fitter and better looked after than their free counter parts in Brittan and the North, who were ruthlessly exploited by industrial capitalists. Free societies were therefore unstable as there was always a danger that the exploited would rise up creating a fearful crisis in republican institutions. Salves by contrast were kept in their place by violent means and denied the right to vote, resist or testify, ensuring the foundation of every well designed and durable republic.
Enslavement of the white working class would be in his words a most glorious act of emancipation. Jefferson’s notion all men are created equal, he wrote, was ridiculously absurd. In the deep southern tradition, Hammond’s republic was modeled on those of ancient Greece and Rome. Featuring rights and democracy for the elite, slavery and submission for inferiors. It was sanctioned by the Christian god whose son never denounced the practice in his documented teachings. It was a perfect aristocratic republic, one that should be a model for the world.
George Fitzhugh endorsed and expanded upon Hammond’s argument to enslave all poor people. Aristocrats, he explained, were really the nations Magna Carta because they owned so much and had the affection which all men feel for what belongs to them. Which naturally lead them to protect and provide for wives, children and slaves. Fitzhugh, whose books were enormously popular declared he was quite as intent on abolishing free society as you northerners are on abolishing slavery.”
― Colin Woodard, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America

“As touching Slave-ships meeting, why, they are in such a prodigious hurry, they run away from each other as soon as possible. And as for Pirates, when they chance to cross each other's cross-bones, the first hail is— "How many skulls?"— the same way that whalers hail— "How many barrels?" And that question once answered, pirates straightway steer apart, for they are infernal villains on both sides, and don't like to see overmuch of each other's villanous likenesses.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“We have never seen a Zoti Aleyu this new, this small, this fragile. How many who'd been just like this were swallowed whole? "Precious pup," we say. We cannot think about its origins. We cannot think of what sickness plagues surface-life affairs that they throw living creatures to the sea to die alone. We must not think of the surface-dwellers and two-legs at all. Only Zoti Aleyu.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“No knowledge about self is self-slavery!”
― Israelmore Ayivor, Six Words Inspiration

“The lives of the older Da Silvas were empty and sad. They mourned the Slave Trade as a lost Golden Age when their family was rich, famous and white. They were worn down by rheumatism and the burdens of polygamy.”
― Bruce Chatwin, The Viceroy of Ouidah

“I saw now why the angry young men on the boats around us were so afraid of that derelict refugee boat: that tiny vessel represented the overturning of a centuries-old project that had been essential to the shaping of Europe. Beginning with the early days of chattel slavery, the European imperial powers had launched upon the greatest and most cruel experiment in planetary remaking that history has ever known: in the service of commerce they had transported people between continents on an almost unimaginable scale, ultimately changing the demographic profile of the entire planet. But even as they were repopulating other continents they had always tried to preserve the whiteness of their own metropolitan territories in Europe.
This entire project had now been upended. The systems and technologies that had made those massive demographic interventions possible – ranging from armaments to the control of information – had now achieved escape velocity: they were no longer under anyone’s control.
This was why those angry young men were so afraid of that little blue fishing boat: through the prism of this vessel they could glimpse the unravelling of a centuries-old project that had conferred vast privilege on them in relation to the rest of the world. In their hearts they knew that their privileges could no longer be assured by the people and institutions they had once trusted to provide for them.
The world had changed too much, too fast; the systems that were in control now did not obey any human master; they followed their own imperatives, inscrutable as demons.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Gun Island

“I will tell you what abolishing the trade did. When a man cannot buy stock, he breeds it. Every woman at Paradise was a belly woman then! Lining up on Sundays, waiting at the front porch for their half-dollars and their maccarronis. "See Massa! Me breed good new neger for Massa. Big strong neger.”
― Sara Collins

“What no one will admit about the anti-slavers is that they've all got a slaver's appetite for misery, even if they want to do different things with it.”
― Sara Collins

“One of the things that is constantly questioned is profitability. The thinking is mostly: the slave trade is so strange, you only drive it if you earn a lot from it. While, for example, an awful lot of slaves already died of infectious diseases while travelling across the Atlantic. I calculated that the Dutch slave trade was only an estimated 0.005 per cent of national income. So that is not much. Moreover, the Dutch slave trade is the only one that ceased to exist for economic reasons.”
― Piet Emmer, De geschiedenis van de Nederlandse slavernij in een notendop

“In 1892, a Belgian trader and his entire caravan of six Europeans and 40 porters were beheaded by a thug controlled by the notorious slaver and warlord Msiri, who asked that their heads be returned to him to decorate his compound. The trader had tried to persuade Msiri and other local tyrants to sell their ivory to his company, which could transport it by river, thus obviating the need for slaves.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“Damaras continued and explained that at the beginning of the Civil War in the United States in 1861, slavery had existed for well over two hundred years and was a multibillion-dollar industry. Summarizing the work of historian David Blight, she explained how slavery was central to the US economy: by 1860 the nearly four million enslaved people were by far the country's most valuable economic asset; valued at approximately $3.5 billion, they were worth more than all of the country's manufacturing and railroads combined.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“Such a tendency has the slave trade to debauch men's minds, and harden them to every feeling of humanity! For I will not suppose that the dealers in slaves are born worse than other men - No, it is the fatality of this mistaken avarice, that it corrupts the milk of human kindness and turns it into gall. And, had the pursuits of those men been different, they might have been as generous, as tender-hearted and just, as they are unfeeling, rapacious and cruel.”
― Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

“Give a slave slaves, and he will support slavery.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“O mar é o maior cemitério deste mundo.”
― Eliana Alves Cruz, O crime do cais do Valongo

“Deixe-me lhe contar algo sobre a morte, senhor advogado. Para nós ela não existe. Apenas vamos viver em outro lugar, junto aos ancestrais, mas para isso precisamos de sepultura digna ou continuaremos vagando aqui, onde não é mais nossa morada, assombrando os vivos e o mundo. Naquela altura, apenas com treze estações das chuvas, eu já possuía dois ancestrais sem residência e errantes nesta Terra de dores. Isto me agulha a alma, me corrói o espírito até hoje. Eles me visitam com o grupo dos que não foram, me suplicam e não sei o que fazer para que encontrem a casa dos nossos mais velhos.”
― Eliana Alves Cruz, O crime do cais do Valongo

“É possível sepultar para sempre passado tão tenebroso?”
― Eliana Alves Cruz, O crime do cais do Valongo

“United States has a 9/11 Memorial, Germany has a Holocaust Memorial, but if you endeavor to commemorate the earth victims of White Terrorism, you'll run out of walls before you run out of names.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“In Colonial English they say: not all muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are muslim. In Naskarian English we say: not all white people are animal, but 99% of historic predators, terrorists, traffickers, thieves, morons and imbeciles were white.

United States has a 9/11 Memorial, Germany has a Holocaust Memorial, but if you endeavor to commemorate the earth victims of White Terrorism, you'll run out of walls before you run out of names.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“A Brief History of Earth Cannibals (Sonnet)

There's no such thing as slave traders,
get your language straight, you idiots -
they were human traffickers, not traders,
you trade in commodity, not people.

Colonizers were not slave traders,
they were terrorists and traffickers;
settlers are not civilizers,
they are plague upon the civilized world.

The world outside europe was already civilized
beyond the wildest dreams of the europeans,
then those brutes set sail, and the human race
experienced an extinction level catastrophe.

To trade in human lives like livestock
is the savagest form of cannibalism -
white history sells the West as the free world,
but dig into earth history, and you'll realize,
West is the biggest threat to life and freedom.

Here is some rectified history,
dig up the rest for yourself -
Churchill was a big fat cannibal,
Leopold was an ugly deadly virus,
Columbus was a most wanted terrorist.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“There's no such thing as slave traders, get your language straight, you idiots - they were human traffickers, not traders, you trade in commodity, not people.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“To trade in human lives like livestock is the savagest form of cannibalism.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“There's no such thing as slave traders, get your language straight, you idiots - they were human traffickers, not traders, you trade in commodity, not people. To trade in human lives like livestock is the savagest form of cannibalism.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“The human race comes from Africa, but inhumanity originated in Europe.”
― Abhijit Naskar, With Love From A Blue Rock