I am the very slave of circumstance And impulse,--borne away with every breath!
Joke with a slave, and he'll soon show his heels.
Base is the slave that pays.
Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.
It is the part of a wise man to resist pleasures, but of a foolish one to be a slave to them.
There are three ways in which a man becomes a slave. He may be born into slavery, or forced into it, or he can deliberately accept his servitude. All three forms flourish in the modern world. Men are born and forced into slavery in Russia and her satellites states. Men in the free world invite slavery when they ask the government to provide complete security, when they surrender their freedom to the “Welfare State.” The slave states of Western world are an outgrowth of monopolistic capitalism — an economic system which is opposed to the wide distribution of private property in many hands. Instead, monopolistic capitalism concentrates productive wealth among a few men, allowing the rest to become a vast proletariat. Some representatives of monopolistic capitalism, sensing this evil in their system, have tried to silence criticism by pointing to the diffused ownership in the great corporations. They advertise, “No one owns more than 4 percent of the stock of this great company.” Or they print lists of stockholders, showing that these include farmers, schoolteachers, baseball players, taxi drivers, and even babies. But there is a catch to this argument, and it is this: although it is true that individuals of small means own shares in the company, it is not true that they run the company. Their responsibility for its policies is nil. Possession properly has two faces, two aspects: we all have a right to private property, but this is accompanied by our responsibility for its righteous use. These two things (which should be inseparable) are frequently divided today. Everyone admits that the farmer who own a horse is obligated to feed and care for it, but in the case of stocks and bonds, we often forget that the same principle should prevail. Monopolistic capitalism is to blame for this; it sunders the right to own property from responsibility that owning property involves. Those who own only a few stocks have no practical control of any industry. They vote by postcard proxy, but they have rarely even seen “their” company. The two elements which ought to be inextricably joined in any true conception of private property — ownership and responsibility — are separated. Those who own do not manage; those who manage; those who manage and work do not control or own. The workmen in a factory may have a shadowy, unknown absentee “employer” — the thousands of individual owners of stock — whom “management” represents and tries to please by extra dividends. The workman’s livelihood is at the disposition of strangers who make a single demand of their representatives: higher profits. Faced with such insecurity, labor unions seek a solution in demands for higher wages, shorter hours, pensions, and such things. But this approach takes monopolistic capitalism for granted, and accepts the unnatural division between property and responsibility as permanent. A much more radical solution is apt to come, and this may take either of two forms. One way of remedying the situation would be through a profound alternative of our political and economic life, with the aim of distributing the means of production more widely by giving every workman a share in profits, management, and ownership, all three. The other alternative which is not a constructive solution is confiscation: this may take the violent form of communism, or the less noticeable form of bureaucratic encroachment through taxation, as favored by the welfare state. [and/or outright confiscation likened to General Motors, AIG, and Banks, etc. etc. etc.] Confiscation in any form is an unhealthy solution for a real disease. It amounts to telling men that because they are economically crippled, they must abandon all efforts to get well and allow the state to provide them with free wheelchairs. The denial of the right of ownership to a man is a denial of his basic freedom: freedom without property is always incomplete. To be “secured” — but with no accompanying responsibility – is to be the slave of whatever group provides the security. A democracy flirts with the danger of becoming a slave in direct ratio to the numbers of its citizens who work, but do not own / or who own, but do not work; or who distribute, as politicians do, but do not produce. The danger of the “slave state” disappears in ratio to the numbers of people who own property and admit its attendant responsibilities under God. They can call their souls their own because they own and administer something other than their souls. Thus they are free. [“New Slavery: Freedom without Property is Incomplete,” originally published in On Being Human: Reflections, On Life and Living , New York: Doubleday & Co., 1982.]
Der Witz ist die Freiheit des Sklaven=--The witty sally is the freedom of the slave.
Let's live with that small pittance which we have; / Who covets more is evermore a slave.
States are to be called happy and noble in so far as they settle rightly who is slave and who free.
I cannot but think that he who finds a certain proportion of pain and evil inseparably woven up in the life of the very worms, will bear his own share with more courage and submission; and will, at any rate, view with suspicion those weakly amiable theories of the Divine government, which would have us believe pain to be an oversight and a mistake,--to be corrected by and by. On the other hand, the predominance of happiness among living things--their lavish beauty--the secret and wonderful harmony which pervades them all, from the highest to the lowest, are equally striking refutations of that modern Manichean doctrine, which exhibits the world as a slave-mill, worked with many tears, for mere utilitarian ends.
The belly is chains to the hands and fetters to the feet. He who is a slave to his belly seldom worships God.
If I'm designed yon lordling's slave, / By Nature's law designed, / Why was an independent wish / E'er planted in my mind?
Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.
<...> black slavery was basic and integral to the entire phenomenon we call “America.” This often hidden or disguised truth ultimately involves the profound contradiction of a free society that was made possible by black slave labor.
Imperat aut servit collecta pecunia cuique=--Money amassed is either our slave or our tyrant.
Thou slave, thou wretch, thou coward! Thou little valiant, great in villany! Thou ever strong upon the stronger side! Thou Fortune's champion that dost never fight But when her humorous ladyship is by To teach thee safety.
If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake, should in terms renounce or give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the grand end of society would absolutely vacate such renunciation. The right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave.
No one is a slave whose will is free.
Niemand ist mehr Sklave, als der sich fur frei halt ohne es zu sein=--No one is more a slave than he who considers himself free without being so.
An ambitious man is slave to everybody.
Laws are only words words written on paper, words that change on society's whim and are interpreted differently daily by politicians, lawyers, judges, and policemen. Anyone who believes that all laws should always be obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher. Anyone who believes that all laws are applied equally, despite race, religion, or economic status, is a fool.
I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.
If there must always be a laboring population distinct from proprietors and employers, we regard the slave system as decidedly preferable to the system at wages. [ Boston Quarterly , July, 1840.]
The great artist is the slave of his ideal.
The slave system is one of constant danger, distrust, suspicion, and watchfulness. It debases those whose toil alone can produce wealth and resources for defence, to the lowest degree of which human nature is capable, to guard against mutiny and insurrection, and thus wastes energies which otherwise might be employed in national development and aggrandizement. The free-labor system educates all alike, and by opening all the fields of industrial employment and all the departments of authority, to the unchecked and equal rivalry of all classes of men, at once secures universal contentment, and brings into the highest possible activity all the physical, moral, and social energies of the whole state.
It is Mind which determines the change of Society, and it was because the mind at work was a Catholic mind that the slave became a serf and was on his way to becoming a peasant and a fully free man—a man free economically as well as politically. The whole spirit of the Church was for small property, and that spirit was slowly, instinctively, working for the establishment of small property throughout Christendom. It was small property subject to servitudes, paying heavy dues to others; but it was small property just the same, and it had struck permanent root. [ The Crisis of Civilization, Being the Matter of a Course of Lectures Delivered at Fordham University, 1937 . Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1991, p. 57.]
If you would have the slave show the virtues of the freeman, you must first make him free. [ Progress and Poverty , p. 310.]
Freedom is not an empty sound; it is not an abstract idea; it is not a thing that nobody can feel. It means, — and it means nothing else, — the full and quiet enjoyment of your own property. If you have not this, if this be not well secured to you, you may call yourself what you will, but you are a slave. [ A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland , 1827, §456.]
A man in debt is so far a slave.
Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, Is the immediate jewel of their souls: Who steals my purse steals trash; 't is something, nothing; 'T was mine, 't is his, and has been slave to thousands; But he that filches from me my good name Robs me of that which not enriches him And makes me poor indeed.
He that cannot reason is a fool. He that will not is a bigot. He that dare not is a slave. [Needs citation.]
Be a slave to truth--the slave to truth is a freeman.
Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest=--Let no man be slave of another who can be his own master.
What matters is that Southern slaves, at least on the larger plantations, created their own African American culture, which helped to preserve some of the more crucial areas of life and thought from white control or domination without significantly reducing the productivity and profitability of slave labor. Living within this African American culture, sustained by strong community ties, many slaves were able to maintain a certain sense of apartness, of pride, and of independent identity.
A cultural inheritance may be acquired between dusk and dawn, and many have been so acquired. But the new "culture" was an inheritance of darkness, wherein "simpleton" meant the same thing as "citizen" meant the same thing as "slave." The monks waited. It mattered not at all to them that the knowledge they saved was useless, that much of it was not really knowledge now empty of content, its subject matter long since gone. Still, such knowledge had a symbolic structure that was peculiar to itself, and at least the symbol-interplay could be observed. To observe the way a knowledge-system is knit together is to learn at least a minimum knowledge-of-knowledge, until someday someday, or some century an Integrator would come, and things would be fitted together again. So time mattered not at all. The Memorabilia was there, and it was given to them by duty to preserve, and preserve it they would if the darkness in the world lasted ten more centuries, or even ten thousand years...
Non Angli, sed angeli=--Not Angles, but angels. _Gregory the Great, on seeing some captive British youths for sale in the slave-market at Rome._
By thunders of white silence.
If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.
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.
Who here with life would sport, / In life shall prosper never; / And he who ne'er will rule himself, / A slave shall be for ever.
Whom Heaven has made a slave, no parliament of men, nor power that exists on earth, can render free.
He noticed her eyes especially were beautiful, well-shaped and of an odd color. “I’ve never seen anybody with eyes the color of yours,” he said. “They are from my mother, I guess. Almost everyone in Jericho has dark eyes, but my mother was a slave. She used to tell me about her home where she was born. There was ice and snow there. Very cold. Her hair was light and her eyes were blue. She died some time ago.” Othniel could not help but admire the woman’s appearance. The lamp was burning, and the yellow light was kind to her, showing the full, soft lines of her body. He noticed also that her face was very expressive. Her feelings showed immediately on her face. She did not smile much, but when she did her whole expression lit up. He wanted to ask her about herself,
You have the Pyrrhic dance as yet, Where is the Pyrrhic phalanx gone? Of two such lessons, why forget The nobler and the manlier one? You have the letters Cadmus gave,-- Think ye he meant them for a slave?
This is the monstrosity in love--that the will is infinite, and the execution confined; that the desire is boundless, and the act a slave to limit.
He, who will not reason, is a bigot; he, who cannot, is a fool; and he, who dares not, is a slave.
L'esclave n'a qu'un maitre; l'ambitieux en a autant qu'il y a de gens utiles a sa fortune=--A slave has but one master; the ambitious man has as many as there are people who help him to his fortune.
Consciousness expresses itself through creation. This world we live in is the dance of the Creator. Dancers come and go in the twinkling of an eye but the dance lives on. On many an occasion when I am dancing, I have felt touched by something sacred. In those moments, I felt my spirit soar and become one with everything that exists. I become the stars and the moon. I become the lover and the beloved. I become the victor and the vanquished. I become the master and the slave. I become the singer and the song. I become the knower and the known. I keep on dancing and then, it is the eternal dance of creation. The Creator and the creation merge into one wholeness of joy. I keep on dancing — until there is only … the dance.
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood... I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today...
Some Southerners effectively applied slave labor to the cultivation of corn, grain, and hemp (for making rope and twine), to mining and lumbering, to building canals and railroads, and even to the manufacture of textiles, iron, and other industrial products. Nevertheless, no other American region contained so many white farmers who merely subsisted on their own produce. The “typical” white Southerner was not a slaveholding planter but a small farmer who tried, often without success, to achieve both relative self-sufficiency and a steady income from marketable cash crops.
"Righteousness is not that ye turn your faces [in prayer] to the east or west; but righteousness is to him who believeth in God and the Last Day, and Angels, and Revealed Books, and Prophets; who giveth cheerfully from his substance to kinsmen, orphans, the needy, the wayfarer, and to them that ask; who freeth the prisoner and the slave; who offereth prayers at their appointed times, and giveth the ordained alms; to them who fulfil the covenants to which they have bound themselves, and who are patient in times of distress, and pain, and struggle: these are they who are sincere [in religion], and who fear to do evil (_Koran_ 2, 172)."
No slave, to lazy ease resign'd, / E'er triumphed over noble foes; / The monarch, Fortune, most is kind / To him who bravely dares oppose.
In the first place, it is obvious that not only is wealth concentrated in our times but an immense power and despotic economic dictatorship is consolidated in the hands of a few, who often are not owners but only the trustees and managing directors of invested funds which they administer according to their own arbitrary will and pleasure. This dictatorship is being most forcibly exercised by those who, since they hold the money and completely control it, control credit also and rule the lending of money. Hence they regulate the flow, so to speak, of the life-blood whereby the entire economic system lives, and have so firmly in their grasp the soul, as it were, of economic life that no one can breathe against their will. This concentration of power and might, the characteristic mark, as it were, of contemporary economic life, is the fruit that the unlimited freedom of struggle among competitors has of its own nature produced, and which lets only the strongest survive; and this is often the same as saying, those who fight the most violently, those who give least heed to their conscience. This accumulation of might and of power generates in turn three kinds of conflict. First, there is the struggle for economic supremacy itself; then there is the bitter fight to gain supremacy over the State in order to use in economic struggles its resources and authority; finally there is conflict between States themselves, not only because countries employ their power and shape their policies to promote every economic advantage of their citizens, but also because they seek to decide political controversies that arise among nations through the use of their economic supremacy and strength. [ Quadragesimo Anno (“On the Restructuring of the Social Order”), §109.] The ultimate consequences of the individualist spirit in economic life are those which you yourselves, Venerable Brethren and Beloved Children, see and deplore: Free competition has destroyed itself; economic dictatorship has supplanted the free market; unbridled ambition for power has likewise succeeded greed for gain; all economic life has become tragically hard, inexorable, and cruel. To these are to be added the grave evils that have resulted from an intermingling and shameful confusion of the functions and duties of public authority with those of the economic sphere — such as, one of the worst, the virtual degradation of the majesty of the State, which although it ought to sit on high like a queen and supreme arbitress, free from all partiality and intent upon the one common good and justice, is become a slave, surrendered and delivered to the passions and greed of men. And as to international relations, two different streams have issued from the one fountain-head: On the one hand, economic nationalism or even economic imperialism; on the other, a no less deadly and accursed internationalism of finance or international imperialism whose country is where profit is. [ Quadragesimo Anno (“On the Restructuring of the Social Order”), §§105-109, 1931.]
Wages is a cunning device of the devil, for the benefit of tender consciences, who would retain all the advantages of the slave system, without the expense, trouble, and odium of being slave-holders. [ Boston Quarterly , July, 1840.]
Miss Goldman is a communist; I am an individualist. She wishes to destroy the right of property, I wish to assert it. I make my war upon privilege and authority, whereby the right of property, the true right in that which is proper to the individual, is annihilated. She believes that co-operation would entirely supplant competition; I hold that competition in one form or another will always exist, and that it is highly desirable it should. But whether she or I be right, or both of us be wrong, of one thing I am sure; the spirit which animates Emma Goldman is the only one which will emancipate the slave from his slavery, the tyrant from his tyranny — the spirit which is willing to dare and suffer.
The fetters of the slave bind the hands only.
Curses always recoil on the head of him who imprecates them. If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.
Probably none of the political delusions which have sprung from the "natural rights" doctrine has been more mischievous than the assertion that all men have a natural right to freedom, and that those who willingly submit to any restriction of this freedom, beyond the point determined by the deductions of _a priori_ philosophers, deserve the title of slave. But to my mind, this delusion is incomprehensible except as the result of the error of confounding natural with moral rights.
That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labors under coercion to satisfy another’s desires. [Quoted in Freedom Daily , March 1990.]
They are not a pipe for fortune's finger To sound what stop she please. Give me that man That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart, As I do thee.--Something too much of this.
Thou of an independent mind, / With soul resolved, with soul resigned; / Prepared Power's proudest frown to brave, / Who wilt not be, nor have a slave; / Virtue alone who dost revere, / Thy own reproach alone dost fear, / Approach this shrine= (Independence), =and worship here.
It was the mission of the Confederacy, ordinary whites were told, to carry out God’s design for an inferior and dependent race. Slaveholders claimed that owning slaves always entailed a duty and a burden — a duty and burden that defined the moral superiority of the South. And this duty and burden was respected by millions of nonslaveholding whites, who were prepared to defend it with their lives. That, perhaps, was the ultimate meaning of a “slave society.
Qui est plus esclave qu'un courtisan assidu si ce n'est un courtisan plus assidu?=--Who is more of a slave than an assiduous courtier, unless it be another courtier who is more assiduous still?
Base in kind, and born to be a slave.
In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free,--honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve.
Was the war being fought to establish that Hitler was wrong in his ideas of white Nordic supremacy over “inferior” races? The United States’ armed forces were segregated by race. When troops were jammed onto the Queen Mary in early 1945 to go to combat duty in the European theater, the blacks were stowed down in the depths of the ship near the engine room, as far as possible from the fresh air of the deck, in a bizarre reminder of the slave voyages of old.
Virtue supposes liberty, as the carrying of a burden supposes active force. Under coercion there is no virtue, and without virtue there is no religion. Make a slave of me, and I shall be no better for it. Even the sovereign has no right to use coercion to lead men to religion, which by its nature supposes choice and liberty. My thought is no more subject to authority than is sickness or health.
That the covetous wants that which he has, as well as that which he has not; because he is master of nothing, and is the slave of his own wealth.
He is the world's master who despises it, its slave who prizes it.
I would not have a slave to till my ground, To carry me, to fan me while I sleep And tremble when I wake, for all the wealth That sinews bought and sold have ever earn'd.
Oh for a tongue to curse the slave Whose treason, like a deadly blight, Comes o'er the councils of the brave, And blasts them in their hour of might!
Give me that man / Who is not passion's slave, and I will wear him / In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of hearts.
Slowly but certainly the proletarian, by every political reform which secures his well-being under new rules of insurance, of State control in education, of State medicine and the rest, is developing into the slave, leaving the rich man apart and free. All industrial civilization is clearly moving towards the re-establishment of the Servile State,… [“The Faith and Capitalism,” Essays of a Catholic . Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1992, p. 226.]