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1 " Our politicians tell us we are free, even though most governments take over 50% of what we earn. They claim we get services that we need for our hard-earned money, even though we could buy the same services at half the price from the private sector. Today, we ridicule the slave-owners' claim that they " gave back" to their slaves by housing, clothing, feeding them, and bestowing upon them the " benefits" of civilization instead of leaving them in their native state. We see this as a self-serving justification for exploitation. In the future, we will view being forcibly taxed to pay for things we don't want, such as bombs for the Middle East, subsidies for tobacco, other people's abortions, regulations that put small businesses out of business, prisons for people trying to feel good, keeping life-saving medications out of the hands of dying people, etc., as taking away our freedom. When even a small portion of our lives is spent enslaved, that part tends to dominate the rest of our time. If we don't put our servitude first as we structure the remainder of our lives, our masters will make sure we regret it. How much freedom do we need to survive and how much do we need to thrive? "
2 " There’s Gold in Them Thar Hills!Cuba has a history of mining that dates back to 1520, when the Spaniards opened the previously mentioned Jaguar gold mine. In 1533, the Jobabo mine was the site of a four-slave uprising which lead to their deaths. To intimidate the slaves and calm the colonists’ fears, the bodies of the strikers were decapitated and put on display in Bayamo. Although the number of strikers was small, the ramifications of this strike were lasting. For the remainder of the 16th Century, a number of confrontations continued between slave owners and their indentured servants consisting of Indians and African field workers. In most cases, their slaves just simply ran away. In 1550, needing replacement workers, Spain granted a group of merchants the right to import additional African slaves into Cuba. Working conditions under Spanish rule were generally unregulated. For the mineworkers conditions were deplorable and continued to be unsafe and unacceptable for another 400 years. "
― Hank Bracker
3 " It was not Christianity which freed the slave: Christianity accepted slavery; Christian ministers defended it; Christian merchants trafficked in human flesh and blood, and drew their profits from the unspeakable horrors of the middle passage. Christian slaveholders treated their slaves as they did the cattle in their fields: they worked them, scourged them, mated them , parted them, and sold them at will. Abolition came with the decline in religious belief, and largely through the efforts of those who were denounced as heretics. "
― Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner
4 " Despite widespread misconceptions in the United States today that the institution of slavery was based on race, for most of the thousands of years in which slavery existed around the world, it was based on whoever was vulnerable to enslavement and within striking distance. Thus Europeans enslaved other Europeans, just as Asians enslaved other Asians and Africans enslaved other Africans, while Polynesians enslaved other Polynesians and the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere enslaved other indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. The very word “slave" derived from the word for Slavs, who were enslaved by fellow Europeans for centuries before Africans began to be brought in chains to the Western Hemisphere. Africans were not singled out by a race for ownership by Europeans, they were resorted to after the rise of nation-states with armies and navies in other parts of the world which reduced the number of places that could be raided for slaves without great costs and risks. Slave-raiding continued in Africa, primarily by Africans enslaving other Africans and then, in West Africa, selling some of their slaves to whites to take to the Western Hemisphere. Meanwhile, the growing range of ships and the growing wealth of nations eventually made economically feasible the transportation of vast numbers of slaves from one continent to another, creating racial differences between the enslaved and their owners as a dominant pattern in the Western Hemisphere. Such a pattern was by no means limited to Europeans owning non-Europeans, however. There were many examples of the reverse, quite aside from vast regions of the earth where neither the slaves nor their owners were either black or white. "
5 " Lenin refused to recognise moral norms established by slave-owners for their slaves and never observed by the slave-owners themselves "
6 " John's master, in allowing his slaves to marry, was much more liberal than most slave owners, who allowed their slaves no such liberty. As a rule negro men were not allowed to marry at all, any attempt to mate with the negro women brought swift, sure horrible punishment and the species were propagated by selected make negroes, who were kept for that purpose, the owners of this provileged negro, charged a fee of one out of every four of his offspring for his services. (Misspellings verbatim as written) "
7 " A few slave holders were undeniably cruel. Examples of slaves beaten to death were not common, neither were they unknown. The majority of slave holders treated their slaves well. "
― , United States History For Christian Schools
8 " No, its the poor I tell you, and the poor only, as does such things for the poor. Don't think to come over me with th' old tale, that the rich knows nothing of the trials of the poor; I say, if they don't know, they ought to know. We're their slaves as long as we can work; we pile up their fortunes with the sweat of our brows, and yet we are to live as separate as if we were in two worlds..." Chap. 1, p. 12 "