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The slave narratives, there is a wealth of research there, because you are hearing stories from the first person account, and that's a whole different thing than reading about it in the history books. You're able to really personalize it.
People don't know that the very reason the police were made was to oversee slaves; they would be called overseers, and if a slave got out of line or tried to break away and escape, these were the people to hold them in and bring them back.
The scariest thought in the world is that someday I'll wake up and realize I've been sleepwalking through my life: underappreciating the people I love, making the same hurtful mistakes over and over, a slave to neuroses, fear, and the habitual.
The best thing about writing has been the writer's life, the sense of being expressed, the ownership of the day, the entirely specious sense of freedom we have, however slave we are to some boss or other. I wouldn't trade it for any other life.
You look at the part in '12 Years A Slave,' you finish that script - I mean, it's a powerful story. You go, 'Man, I have to play a bad character in this.' And then you go, 'Well, do I want to play a bad character and contribute to a good story?'
The original Alexandre Dumas was born in 1762, the son of 'Antoine Alexandre de l'Isle,' in the French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue. Antoine was a nobleman in hiding from his family and from the law, and he fathered the boy with a black slave.
I think the whole stigma of 'black movies' is slowly being lost. When you look at movies like '12 Years A Slave,' to 'The Butler,' to 'The Best Man,' to 'Ride Along,' to even 'Think Like a Man' from last year - these movies are just good movies.
I am afraid that woman appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more than anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts. We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters, all the same. They love being dominated.
I love drawing on lead. Romans used to curse each other with sheets of it. My slave would come slide the sheet under your door with a curse on it. They had amazing writing and drawings on them, and they survive to this day since lead is so stable.
Perhaps, despite my objections, the success of films like: 'The Help,' 'Django,' 'The Butler,' or '12 Years a Slave,' will further persuade Hollywood to widen its view and edit its erroneous perception of what a commercial black film can look like.
But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns.
Now is the time for the U.S. and the nations of Western Europe who engaged in the slave trade throughout this hemisphere to come forward in a positive way to assist in undoing the harm that was caused by their past colonial policies in the hemisphere.
I have come to the conclusion that a goodly number of the fables that pass under the name of the Samian slave, Aesop, were derived from India, probably from the same source whence the same tales were utilised in the Jatakas, or Birth-stories of Buddha.
Having a wife and kids drove home the brutal reality of the slave system for me - the price it exacted on families. On the other hand, whenever I despair over our history, I am brought back to hope, the hope that things will get better, for my children.
Many white people sense that they are being blamed for the sins of white slave owners and imperialists merely through some lineage of ethnicity. Activists' constant stress on white privilege can lead to an unhealthy defensive posture of white victimhood.
I remember I was up for the role of Jim in 'Huck Finn,' and because I went to Harvard and Yale, they didn't think I would be able to play a slave. I said, 'Oh, please.' I had to go in there and prove to them that I wasn't too intelligent to play a slave.
From his roots as a slave, the American Negro - sometimes sorrowing, sometimes jubilant but always hopeful - has touched, illuminated, and influenced the most remote preserves of world civilisation. I and my dance theater celebrate this trembling beauty.
We know there needs to be diversity in storytellers telling their own stories. I think there's a beautiful forward movement in that direction with McQueen telling '12 Years A Slave,' with Coogler telling 'Fruitvale,' and with Daniels telling 'The Butler.'
Just as the slave master required the slaves to imitate the image he had of them, so women, who live in a relatively powerless position, politically and economically, feel obliged by a kind of implicit force to live up to culture's image of what is female.
Everybody has told the story of black people in struggle except black people. The black people in the struggle haven't had the means to tell the story historically. There were a million slaves, but you see very few slave narratives. And that is intentional.
There are a lot of chapters to the banjo's history. Part of it are the roots in Africa, where it's a more primitive instrument. Then it comes to the United States where it morphs into the slave music that they created here, which was very African in origin.
It is hard to conceive of the utter demoralization, of the political blindness and immorality, of the patriotic dishonesty, of the cruelty and degradation of a people who supplemented the incomparable Declaration of Independence with the Fugitive Slave Law.
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.
When I was 12, I read about Iqbal Masih, a child slave who escaped the carpet factory where he'd been chained to a loom since the age of four. Iqbal led an anti-child labor crusade that made global headlines, including the one that first caught my attention.
If you look at companies like Twitter, Google, all these companies started with ideas and then everybody used it. In my world, people don't think like that. Rappers chase the next check. They become a slave to labels and eventually that money starts shrinking.
Mary Lincoln provided Elizabeth Keckley with opportunities for social and economic advancement she probably had never imagined during her years as a slave, while Elizabeth offered Mary the loyal, steadfast friendship she craved but had always found so elusive.
I don't want to be sitting and pondering over how many stars my film will get. It's rubbish! I make films that I like - some get really appreciated, and some don't. Till now, luckily, they have done well, but I can't become a slave to that. And I won't - never!
'Troy' is an adaptation of the Trojan War myth in its entirety, not 'The Iliad' alone. 'The Iliad' begins with the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon over the slave girl Briseis nine years into the war. The equivalent scene occurs halfway through my script.
The feudal concept of self-preservation is poisoned at the core by the virulent assumption of master and man, of potentate and slave, of external and internal suppression of the life urge of the only one - of its faith in human sacrifice as a means of salvation.
I was 7 years old when 'Roots' was first broadcast, and my parents gathered all us kids around the TV to learn about how we got here. But it wasn't until I sat down and immersed myself in the research that I got the barest inkling of what it meant to be a slave.
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.
South Carolina is one of the most racist states in America. John C. Calhoun is the name of a building at our school and he was a slave owner. Clemson, the name Clemson itself, was like a guy who was a slave owner. South Carolina, their whole history is messed up.
The idea of making a film - a film that I had certainly never seen before - about the slave experience was a huge responsibility. It's a project that requires a wider understanding of the geopolitical nature of the slave trade, of historical and modern-day racism.
Now a slave is not 'held' by any legal contract, obligation, duty, or authority, which the laws will enforce. He is 'held' only by brute force. One person beats another until the latter will obey him, work for him, if he require it, or do nothing if he require it.
The thing is, so much of the African American experience is about the redefinition of roots because of slavery. We were uprooted, and there's so much about our whole legacy that was stolen and that we lost in the Transatlantic slave trade that we'll never find out.
In the 1850s, as the numbers of Americans who were not invested in the slave system grew, the South's leaders felt they had to entrench their power in the government or it was only a question of time until lawmakers would begin to regulate, or even outlaw, slavery.
Being a slave meant never having the stability of knowing your family would be together as many years as God designed it to be. It meant you could come back from picking cotton in a field to find that your children are gone, your husband's gone, your mother's gone.
Nobody would deny that if someone was a billionaire in 1962, his billions are going to affect all of his descendants. The reverse is also true. The lack of education, material, and finances for a slave are going to affect the descendants of that individual as well.
What should we suppose must naturally be the consequence of our carrying on a slave trade with Africa? With a country, vast in its extent, not utterly barbarous, but civilized in a very small degree? Does any one suppose a slave trade would help their civilization?
Ben Carson was appointed to be the HUD secretary. He knows nothing about the mission of HUD. He doesn't care about people in public housing. He believes that if you are poor, it is your own fault. And he doesn't know the difference between an immigrant and a slave.
In the 1930s, the government paid writers to interview 80- and 90-year-old former slaves, and I read those accounts. I came away realizing - not surprisingly - that many slave masters were sadists who spent a lot of time thinking up creative ways of hurting people.
Hundreds of thousands and millions of wage slaves of capital and peasants downtrodden by the serf-owners are going to the slaughter for the dynastic interests of a handful of crowned brigands, for the profits of the bourgeoisie in its drive to plunder foreign lands.
I've read stories of slave owners who were very generous. They didn't keep them in shackles, they didn't whip the slaves, they built schools and churches for them, free housing, free food, free everything. It's wrong. No matter how nice you make it look, it's wrong.
For the 'Rai-kirah' books, I began with the image of Aleksander riding the great wastelands, and that quickly morphed into the desert. Because I wanted my slave market cold and miserable, I chose to set the opening scene in the empire's summer capital in the mountains.
We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.
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.
It's no longer necessary to slave over the vocals. I don't sing the lyrics until I write them, and singing is the very last thing I do. I record the entire track, and then I worry about lyrics and vocals. The music will suggest where the words are going to a certain extent.
The proposition of an established classification of states as slave states and free states, as insisted on by some, and into northern and southern, as maintained by others, seems to me purely imaginary, and of course the supposed equilibrium of those classes a mere conceit.
I will form good habits and become their slave. And how will I accomplish this difficult feat? Through these scrolls it will be done, for each scroll contains a principle which will drive a bad habit from my life and replace it with one which will bring me closer to success.
I describe the relationship between man and woman as a Hegelian relationship between master and slave. As long as men are able to increase their sexual value through work, fame or wealth, while women are only powerful through their body, beauty and youth, nothing will change.