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"You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance-no matter how improved-as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this."
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Exlpore more Slavery quotes
"If a slave is unwilling to go with his new master, he is whipped, or locked up in jail, until he consents to go, and promises not to run away during the year."
"The secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition."
"There cannot be found in the animal kingdom a bat, or any other creature, so blind in its own range of circumstance and connection, as the greater majority of human beings are in the bosoms of their families."
"Slavery exists. It is black in the South, and white in the North."
"In a word, if any kind of slavery can be vindicated by the Holy Scriptures, we are already sure our making and holding the Negroes our slaves, as we do, cannot be vindicated by any thing we can find there, but is condemned by the whole of divine revelation."
"The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and to be bought for it."
"We are slaves whose masters are dead. For we are mostly controlled by doctrines which were established centuries heretofore."
"Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds!"
"Some of today's slaves sleep on king size beds."
Explore more quotes by Ta-Nehisi Coates
"My work is to give you what I know of my own particular path while allowing you to walk your own."
"Some of us make it out. But the game is played with loaded dice. I wish I had known more, and I wished I had known it sooner."
"When you read a comic book, there's a space between what's happening on the panel and what you have to literally see in your mind. That's not true of movies, where you see everything."
"Barack Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing 'mere about symbols."
"To question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps more than, the answers."
"I had thought that I must mirror the outside world, create a carbon copy of white claims to civilization. It was beginning to occur to me to question the logic of the claim itself... I was was only beginning to learn to be wary of my own humanity, of my own hurt and anger - I didn't yet realize that the boot on your neck is just as likely to make you delusional as it is to ennoble."
"What did I know of loving anything, beyond a longing, beyond being biased in one woman's direction."
"You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact."
"Mostly they all were products of single parents, and in the most tragic category - black boys, with no particular criminal inclinations but whose very lack of direction put them in the crosshairs of the world."
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