Gregory Maguire Quotes

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

It surprises people that there's actually a very large number of slaves in the world today-our best estimate is 27 million. And that is defining a slave in a very narrow way; we're not talking about sweatshop workers or people who are just poor, we're talking about people who are controlled by violence, who cannot walk away, who are being held against their will, who are being paid nothing.

Modern slavery - be it bonded labor, involuntary servitude, or sexual slavery - is a crime and cannot be tolerated in any culture, community, or country ... [It] is an affront to our values and our commitment to human rights.

There are more than 27 million people enslaved in the world today - that's double the amount of people taken from Africa during the entire trans-Atlantic slave trade.

It's modern-day slavery.

I think most people when you say slavery tend to see a group of anonymous people pulling cotton sacks in great plantation fields, and that is largely true.

In antiquity slaves were, in all honesty called slaves. In the middle ages, they took the name of serfs. Nowadays they are called wage earners.

Slavery is a condition imposed upon individuals or races not sufficiently able to protect or defend themselves, and so long as a race or people expose themselves to the danger of being weak, no one can tell when they will be reduced to slavery.

Slavery may, perhaps, be best compared to the infantile disease of measles; a complaint which so commonly attacks the young of humanity in their infancy, and when gone through at that period leaves behind it so few fatal marks; but which when it normally attacks the fully developed adult becomes one of the most virulent and toxic of diseases, often permanently poisoning the constitution where it does not end in death.

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.

Slavery is the ultimate and greatest evil. For it is based on a denial of the dignity of the human soul.

Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone.

Slavery can never be abolished.

There's still nearly the same amount of slavery, if not more, in the world today, as there was at the height of the slave trade.

Slavery itself, considered as such in its essential nature, is not at all contrary to the natural and divine law, and there can be several just titles of slavery and these are referred to by approved theologians and commentators of the sacred canons.... It is not contrary to the natural and divine law for a slave to be sold, bought, exchanged or given

The traffic in slaves is a matter on which all sects and nations have agreed from the time of the sons of Adam ... up to this day.

The wife owes service and labor to her husband as much and as absolutely as the slave does to his master.

The draft should be called slavery, involuntary servitude.

It is a debasement of our common humanity that must be called by its true name, modern slavery …. When a woman is locked in a sweatshop, or trapped in a home as a domestic servant, alone and abused and incapable of leaving—that’s slavery.

I have known men who have been sold and bought a hundred times, who have only got very fat and very comfortable in the process of exchange.

Slavery is an institution for converting men into monkeys.

Slavery holds few men fast; the greater number hold fast their slavery.

I am confident that we will one day end the scourge of modern slavery, because I believe in those committed to this issue.

Slavery is the offspring of darkness.