David W. Blight Quotes

The slave trade was globalism. Why people insist that globalism, after its hideous history, is a good thing, I do not know.

The slaves of socialism are slaves, but they are no one's property and therefore no one's loss.

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.

Slavery was forced upon us by the most extremist exigency of circumstances in a struggle for very existence. Without it, it is doubtful whether a white man would now be existing on this continent--certain that, if there were, they would be in a states of the utmost destitution, weakness, and misery.

There is not a respectable system of civilization known to history whose foundations were not laid in the institution of domestic slavery.

The Atlantic Slave Trade was greatest planned accumulation of wealth that the world has ever known.

Slavery is the first form of Globalization in which America participated.

… an old idea is not necessarily a good one — slavery is an old idea; so is polygamy.

The number of Negroes imported into the island [West Indies] and retained for its [England’s] consumption was more than double the number that existed there in 1817, and could scarcely have been less than 750,000 and certainly, at the most moderate estimate, not less than 700,000. If to these we were to add the children that must have been born on the Island in the long period of 178 years, and then reflect that all who remained for emancipation amounted to only 311,000 we should find ourselves forced to the conclusion that slavery was here attended with a destruction of life almost without a parallel in the history of a civilized nation.

Cotton is a beautiful crop, the way it catches the light, but it's history is blood soaked.

The evil of slavery and colonialism was that these oppressions kept their victims out of history, disconnected them from the evolutionary struggle.

We've yet to deal with the uncomfortable history of England being involved in the transatlantic slave trade, whereas America has at least made some movies dealing with its racial history.

Looking at the numbers, the transatlantic slave trade matches the Holocaust in horror - maybe even without counting subsidiary effects like internal strife and deaths inflected on the continent, death during transport, death during ownership, collapse of African economies, and such.

The first Black Migration to this country was forced migration. It was the Middle Passage.

Imperialism and slavery are no white male monopoly, but are everywhere from Egypt, Assyria, and Persia to India, China and Japan.

The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery.

America was founded on the backs of slaves.

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.

American slavery was not a Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It was a holocaust. My ancestors are slaves. Stolen from Africa. I will honor them.

I mean, it's real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace.

When slavery is established in any part of the world, those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom.

Slavery is the most insane thing... I don't know that we've ever seen in history, but it's got to be close. The idea of slavery is such a base impulse. It's like, "I'm going to kidnap you and then you're going to do everything I want." Like, what? And then there's the historical aspect. It had a huge effect on human history.

Modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history of slavery, genocide, violence and exploitation every bit as abhorrent as Mao's China or Stalin's Soviet Union.

When the slave auctioneer asked in what he was proficient, he replied, "In ruling people."

Truth and Truthfulness is an ambitious work, and its journeys into history give it a breadth unusual in these days of increased academic specialization. . . . William's book combines real history and fictional constructs to tell a revealing story that makes us reconsider the meaning of familiar concepts.