Montesquieu Quotes

Racism is a way to gain economic advantage at the expense of others. Slavery and plantations may be gone, but racism still allows us to regard those who may keep us from financial gain as less than equals.

The enslavement of Africans [in America] built the world's strongest economy.

The United States was founded on the triple sin of slavery, genocide, and land theft.

The fact that slavery is written into the Constitution is about as entrenched a form of classism as you could possibly imagine.

For people who have been slaves for 150 years doing all the work to be called lazy and shiftless by the man who was sitting on the porch—that is a phenomenon in itself.

They are a scurvy race and simply savages. We could beat hell out of them.

Your race has suffered the greatest wrong that has ever been inflicted on any continent.

There is not an inn between Washington and Montgomery, a distance of over 1000 miles, that will accommodate me to a bed or a meal. Now then, is there a man on this floor who is so heartless, whose breast is so void of better feelings, as to say that this brutal custom needs no regulation. I hold that it does, and Congress is the body to regulate it.

In all social systems there must be a class to do the mean duties... It constitutes the very mudsills of society...Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to the purpose...We use them for that purpose and call them slave.

African slaves, the substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it.

I have to battle so many issues, and the biggest is racism.

We live in a country that has profited for hundreds of years off the labor of individuals without having to pay for it.

Nowhere in history has the white man been brotherly toward anyone.

There's racism and sexism and ageism and all sorts of idiocies. But bad news is not news. We've had bad news as a species for a long time. We've had slavery and human sacrifice and the holocaust and brutalities of such measure.

Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.

The draft is white people sending black people to fight yellow people to protect the country they stole from red people.

Slavery exists. It is black in the South, and white in the North.

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.

Racism is beyond common sense and has no place in our society.

The hate and scorn showered on us Negro officers by our fellow Americans convinced me that there was no sense in my dying for a world ruled by them. I made up my mind that if I got through this war I would study law and use my time fighting for men who could not strike back.

Jefferson owned slaves. He did not believe that all were created equal. He was a racist.

Racism oppresses its victims, but also binds the oppressors, who sear their consciences with more and more lies until they become prisoners of those lies. They cannot face the truth of human equality because it reveals the horror of the injustices they commit.

There are two things that have always haunted me: the brutality of the European traders and the stories I've heard about Africans selling other Africans into slavery.

Villa Grande has in many ways symbolized an important, but less than pleasant, part of our history.

The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery.