“An economy built on slave labor is vulnerable in two ways. One, availability of forced labor discourages technical innovation. The very wealthy [Roman]empire experienced no industrial revolutions. Two -- even more crucial -- slaves do not reproduce their own numbers. As Rome's wars of conquest ended, the slave population began to shrink, leading to a shortage of agricultural laborers by 200 A.D.”

“Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor.”

“Yes," she said. "'I Been Working on the Railroad.'There's just two things I'm worried about with that: the grammar and the use of slave labor.”

“The German economic historian Fanz Oertel in the 1950s points to another drastic consequence of a slave economy. A slave economy initially allowed an increase of productivity through the invention and use of new machinery. Roman products remained at a simple level and could be reproduced by handicraft. By the fourth century, for example, the robust pottery industry of Greece was in sharp decline because other parts of the empire also learned to make pottery."The decline in international trade in the Mediterranean in the fourth century was partly due to increasing piracy, but it was also due to lack of industrial innovation and of need for exchange of manufactured goods.”

“The more they lack material things, the more they indulge themselves when they can, but the less is their satisfaction with this world and they hunger for life after death(on Russian slave laborers.)”

“Work and its results always outlived those who labored at it as any Egyptian slave-ghost will tell you.”