#slave

...In the end, there's no sort of difference between dying from ignorance and dying under the feet of thousands of men who have regained their freedom. You close your eyes, and then there's nothing anymore. And death is never difficult. It requires neither a hero nor a slave. It eats what it's served. ↗

— Philippe Claudel

#freedom #humanity #slavery #death

It seems that it is madder never to abandon one's self than often to be infatuated; better to be wounded, a captive and a slave, than always to walk in armor. ↗

— Margaret Fuller

#always #armor #better #captive #infatuated

No one thinks of Mexico and Peru as black. But Mexico and Peru together got 700,000 Africans in the slave trade. The coast of Acapulco was a black city in the 1870s. And the Veracruz Coast on the gulf of Mexico and the Costa Chica, south of Acapulco are traditional black lands. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#city #coast #got #gulf #lands

Because Lincoln is so closely identified with what it is to be American, everyone wants to claim him, to rewrite his story to satisfy their own particular needs. For my own people, it was important to imagine him as the Great Emancipator, the Moses who led us out of slavery. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#because #claim #closely #everyone #great

Keeping the Union together, freeing slaves and being assassinated all added up to creating 'Lincoln the myth.' He overcame a lot of his own prejudices and became what many would consider the first black man's president. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#assassinated #became #being #black #consider

Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique. When you're willing to stand up within the group and say, 'It is wrong for Black people to be anti-Semitic,' or 'It is wrong for America to discriminate against persons of African descent and made them slaves and based its wealth upon free labor,' it's crucial to say that. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#against #america #anti-semitic #based #best

The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#agents #been #between #business #commercial

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. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#always #brutality #european #haunted #heard

You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to... do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#africa #alex #back #case #envy

A cat will be your friend, but never your slave. ↗

— Theophile Gautier

#friend #never #slave #will #your