Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves.
What difference in point of obedience is there between a soldier and a Carthusian? For both are alike under rule and dependent, both engaged in equally irksome labours. But the soldier always hopes to bear rule, and though he never does so, for even captains and princes are always slaves and dependents, he ever hopes and ever works to attain mastery, whereas the Carthusian makes a vow never to be aught else than dependent. Thus they do not differ in their perpetual servitude, which is the same always for both, but in the hope which one always has, the other never.
Communism worked honestly by officials devoid of human frailties and devoted to nothing but the good of its slaves, would have certain manifest material advantages as compared with a proletarian wage-system where millions live in semi-starvation, and many millions more in permanent dread thereof. But even if it were administered thus Communism would only produce its benefits through imposing slavery. [ The Great Heresies . Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1991, p. 151.]
Now were we not slaves to passion, a week and a hundred years would seem one and the same thing.
Where bastard Freedom waves The fustian flag in mockery over slaves.
Ich bin es mude, uber Sklaven zu herrschen=--I am tired of ruling over slaves.
Abraham took nothing for himself, but only for his servants; so the just man takes for himself nothing of the world, nor of the applause of the world, but only for his passions, which he uses as their master, saying to the one, 'Go,' and to another, 'Come.' _Sub te erit appetitus tuus._ The passions thus subdued are virtues. God himself attributes to himself avarice, jealousy, anger; and these are virtues as well as kindness, pity, constancy, which are also passions. We must treat them as slaves, and leaving to them their food hinder the soul from taking any of it. For when the passions gain the mastery they are vices, then they furnish nutriment to the soul, and the soul feeds on it and is poisoned.
We are the slaves of objects round us, and appear little or important according as these contract or give us room to expand.
Corrupted freemen are the worst of slaves.
Corrupted freemen are the worst of slaves.
We move too much in platoons; we march by sections; we do not live in our vital individuality enough; we are slaves to fashion, in mind and in heart, if not to our passions and appetites.
Jesus Christ did nothing but teach men that they were lovers of themselves, that they were slaves, blind, sick, miserable, and sinners, that he would deliver them, enlighten, bless, and heal them, that this would be brought about by hatred of self, and by following him through poverty and the death of the cross.
It is the curse of kings to be attended / By slaves, that take their humours for a warrant.
Some slaves are scourged to their work by whips, others by restlessness and ambition.
Tools may be animate as well as inanimate; for instance, a ship’s captain uses a lifeless rudder, but a living man for watch; for a servant is, from the point of view of his craft, categorized as one of its tools. So any piece of property can be regarded as a tool enabling a man to live, and his property is an assemblage of such tools; a slave is a sort of living piece of property; and like any other servant is a tool in charge of other tools. For suppose that every tool we had could perform its task, either at our bidding or itself perceiving the need, and if—like the statues made by D?dalus or the tripods of Heph?stus, of which the poet says that “self-moved they enter the assembly of the gods” — shuttles in a loom could fly to and fro and a plectrum play a lyre all self-moved, then master-craftsmen would have no need of servants nor masters of slaves. [ The Politics . Book I, Chapter iv, §1253b23.]
Freedom has a thousand charms to show, / That slaves, howe'er contented, never know.
And ne'er shall the sons of Columbia be slaves, While the earth bears a plant or the sea rolls its waves.
Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame A mechanized automaton.
Kings are but the slaves of their position; they dare not follow what their own hearts dictate.
A final word should be said concerning the status of free blacks. Before the American Revolution this status had been ambiguous, and the number of free blacks was insignificant. <...> A rash of new laws, similar to the later Black Codes of Reconstruction, reduced free blacks almost to the status of slaves without masters. The new laws regulated their freedom of movement, forbade them to associate with slaves, subjected them to surveillance and discipline by whites, denied them the legal right to testify in court against whites, required them to work at approved jobs, and threatened them with penal labor if not actual reenslavement.
<...> slaves became the major form of Southern wealth (aside from land), and slaveholding became the means to prosperity. <...> The later impoverishment of the South nourished the myth that the slave economy had always been historically “backward,” stagnating, and unproductive. We now know that investment in slaves brought a considerable profit and that the Southern economy grew rapidly throughout the pre–Civil War decades. It is true, however, that the system depended largely on the international demand for cotton as the world entered the age of industrialization, led by the British textile industry. There was an increasing demand for clothing that was cheaper than linen and not as hot and heavy as wool.
We are slaves, / The greatest as the meanest--nothing rests / Upon our will.... And when we think we lead, we are most led.
Power, like a desolating pestilence, / Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience, / Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, / Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame a mechanized automaton.
seeming's enough for slaves of space and time — ours is the now and here of freedom. Come
Thoughts= (are) =the slaves of life, and life time's fool; / And time, that takes survey of all the world, / Must have a stop.= 1
If we do a thing because we think it is our duty, we generally fail; that is the old law which makes slaves of us. The real spring of our life, and of our work in life, must be love--true, deep love--not love of this or that person, or for this or that reason, but deep human love, devotion of soul to soul, love of God realised where alone it can be, in love of those whom He loves. Everything else is weak, passes away; that love alone supports us, makes life tolerable, binds the present together with the past and future, and is, we may trust, imperishable.
Greatness, with private men / Esteem'd a blessing, is to me a curse; / And we, whom from our high births they conclude / The only free men, are the only slaves: / Happy the golden mean.
Glorious men are the scorn of wise men, the admiration of fools, the idols of parasites, and the slaves of their own vaunts.
Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves only in the legal sense. Technology was the slave’s real emancipator. Technology freed the slave by transferring his toil onto the tireless backs of non-human slaves driven by water, steam, petroleum and electricity. But the Black man…has never owned, and never had a chance to own, the machine that replaced and indeed, surpassed his power to toil a thousandfold. When he lost his servitude he lost his livelihood. As Frederick Douglas said, “Emancipation made the slaves free to hunger; free to the winter and rains of heaven…free without roofs to cover them or bread to eat or land to cultivate.” For all his good intentions, Lincoln didn’t free the slaves. He fired them.… People who teach economics are mostly white, but the people who understand economics are mostly Black.… Slavery taught us WHO had the leisure, WHO had freedom, WHO had wealth. Not the slave, but the slave owner. Not the sharecropper, but the land-owner. Not the employee, but the capital owner. [Statement on 1969 founding of Soul City, North Carolina on the 160th Anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth; former President of the Congress or Racial Equality (CORE).]
Before man made us citizens, great Nature made us men.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants, it is the creed of slaves.
Kings and their subjects, masters and slaves, find a common level in two places--at the foot of the cross and in the grave.
Tell me, doc. Tell me. Why do they have wars?” I shook my head. Was there ever a good reason? To make the world safe for democracy? To stop the death camps? To free the slaves? Maybe. Those were better reasons than cheap oil. But up close, no matter what the reason, it was husbands and sons and brothers who never came home.
He is the free man whom the truth makes free, / And all are slaves besides.
The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. [ The Soul of Man Under Socialism .]
When Britain first, at Heaven's command, Arose from out the azure main, This was the charter of her land, And guardian angels sung the strain: Rule, Britannia! Britannia rules the waves! Britons never shall be slaves.
In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves:
Fear is the virtue of slaves; but the heart that loveth is willing.
They are slaves who dare not be / In the right with two or three.
Wages? You want to be wage slaves? Answer me that! Of course not. What is it that makes wage slaves? Wages! I want you to be free. Strike off your chains! Strike up the band! Strike three you’re out! Remember, there’s nothing like Liberty, except Colliers and The Saturday Evening Post . Be free, now and forever. One and individual. One for all and all for me, and tea for two and six for a quarter…. [Movie, Coconuts , 1925.]
Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves. [ The Gathering Storm , Bk.I, Ch.19, Houghton Mifflin, 1948, p.348.]
I shall choose friends among men, but neither slaves nor masters. And I shall choose only such as please me, and them I shall love and respect, but neither command nor obey. And we shall join our hands when we wish, or walk alone when we so desire.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
It would be folly to entertain any ill-feeling towards those neighbours and rivals who, like ourselves, are slaves of Istar; but if somebody is to be starved, the modern world has no Oracle of Delphi to which the nations can appeal for an indication of the victim. It is open to us to try our fortune; and, if we avoid impending fate, there will be a certain ground for believing: that we are the right people to escape. _Securus judical orbis_.
Fools grant whate'er ambition craves, / And men, once ignorant, are slaves.
The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him, they crush those beneath them.
When affliction thunders over our roofs, to hide our heads and run into our graves shows us no men, but makes us fortune's slaves.
The very mudsills of society. . . . We call them slaves. . . . But I will not characterize that class at the North with that term; but you have it. It is there, it is everywhere; it is eternal.
We will have to choose not between color nor race nor religion nor between East and West either, but simply between being slaves and being free. And we will have to choose completely and for good; the time is already past now when we can choose a little of each, a little of both. We can choose a state of slavedom, and if we are powerful enough to be among the top two or three or ten, we can have a certain amount of license — until someone more powerful rises and has us machine-gunned against a cellar wall. [ Harper’s Magazine , June, 1956.]
One made the observation of the people of Asia that they were all slaves to one man, merely because they could not pronounce that syllable No.
Ay, down to the dust with them, slaves as they are! From this hour let the blood in their dastardly veins, That shrunk at the first touch of Liberty's war, Be wasted for tyrants, or stagnate in chains.
When the mass of families in a State are without property, then those who were once citizens become virtually slaves. The more the State steps in to enforce conditions of security and sufficiency; the more it regulates wages, provides compulsory insurance, doctoring, education, and in general takes over the lives of the wage-earners, for the benefit of the companies and men employing the wage-earners, the more is this condition of semi-slavery accentuated. [ The Great Heresies . Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1991, p. 150.]
Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery. [“In Praise of Idleness,” In Praise of Idleness: And Other Essays , New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972, p. 14.]
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal." 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 a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state, sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. 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.
Men pursue riches under the idea that their possession will set them at ease, and above the world. But the law of association often makes those who begin by loving gold as a servant, finish by becoming themselves its slaves; and independence without wealth is at least as common as wealth without independence.--_Colton._
Necessity is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Kings are the slaves of history.
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.
[T]he ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil. [ General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money , Book VI, Section V.]
Rule, Britannia, Britannia rules the waves; / Britons never shall be slaves.
Freedom has a thousand charms to show, That slaves, howe'er contented, never know.
Mechanic slaves With greasy aprons, rules, and hammers.
They are slaves who fear to speak For the fallen and the weak. They are slaves who dare not be In the right with two or three.
Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
So many slaves, so many enemies.
Despite widespread attemps to equate human captives with domestic animals and even to market them and price them the same way <...> slaves were fortunately never held long enough in a distinctive group to undergo genetic neoteny <...>. Yet a kind of neoteny was clearly the goal of many slaveholders, even if they lacked a scientific understanding of how domestication changed the nature and behavior of animals. Aristotle's ideal of the "natural slave" was very close to what a human being would be like if subjected to a genetic change similar to that of domesticated plants and animals.
What can ennoble sots or slaves or cowards? Alas! not all the blood of all the Howards.
What can ennoble sots, or slaves, or cowards? / Alas! not all the blood of all the Howards.
One man is an oppressor because many are slaves; let us despise the slaves.
For still the new transcends the old In signs and tokens manifold; Slaves rise up men; the olive waves, With roots deep set in battle graves!
Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.
The Jews who were called to subdue the nations and their kings were slaves of sin, and the Christians whose calling has been to be servants and subjects, are free children.
Cognitive science has something of enormous importance to contribute to human freedom: the ability to learn what our unconscious conceptual systems are like and how our cognitive unconscious functions. If we do not realize that most of our thought is unconscious and that we think metaphorically, we will indeed be slaves to the cognitive unconscious. Paradoxically, the assumption that we have a radically autonomous rationality as traditionally conceived actually limits our rational autonomy. It condemns us to cognitive slavery - to an unaware and uncritical dependence on our unconscious metaphors. To maximize what conceptual freedom we can have, we must be able to see through and move beyond philosophies that deny the existence of an embodied cognitive unconscious that governs most of our mental lives.
Perhaps no order of mammals presents us with so extraordinary a series of gradations as this*--leading us insensibly from the crown and summit of the animal creation down to creatures, from which there is but a step, as it seems, to the lowest, smallest, and least intelligent of the placental Mammalia. It is as if nature herself had foreseen the arrogance of man, and with Roman severity had provided that his intellect, by its very triumphs, should call into prominence the slaves, admonishing the conqueror that he is but dust.
She was a woman, slight, almost frail in appearance; not someone who could fight with guns to free the slaves, as in the United States, but someone who could fight with knowledge in the corner of the world where she found herself.
In the effort to restore private property as a general institution normal to the family and giving its tone to the whole State, we must remember one very grievous proviso: the task is impossible unless there be still left in the mass of men a sufficient desire for economic independence to urge them towards its attainment. You can give political independence by a stroke of the pen, you can declare slaves to be free or give the vote to men who have hitherto had no vote, but you cannot give property to men or families as a permanent possession unless they desire economic freedom sufficiently to be willing to undertake its burdens. [ 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. 174.]
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.
The master of slaves has seldom the soul of a man.
Choose your friends, then treat them as friends; do not regard them like slaves or servants, but associate with them frankly and simply and generously; not saying one thing of them and thinking something else.
Slavery is an inherent inheritance of a large portion of the human race, to whom the more you give of their own free will, the more slaves they will make themselves.
Imitation causes us to leave natural ways to enter into artificial ones; it therefore makes slaves.--_Dr. Vinet._
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.
Of the land which the Romans gained by conquest from their neighbours, part they sold publicly, and turned the remainder into common; this common land they assigned to such of the citizens as were poor and indigent, for which they were to pay only a small acknowledgment into the public treasury. But when the wealthy men began to offer larger rents, and drive the poorer people out, it was enacted by law that no person whatever should enjoy more than five hundred acres of ground. This act for some time checked the avarice of the richer, and was of great assistance to the poorer people, who retained under it their respective proportions of ground, as they had been formerly rented by them. Afterwards the rich men of the neighbourhood contrived to get these lands again into their possession, under other people’s names, and at last would not stick to claim most of them publicly in their own. The poor, who were thus deprived of their farms, were no longer either ready, as they had formerly been, to serve in war or careful in the education of their children; insomuch that in a short time there were comparatively few freemen remaining in all Italy, which swarmed with workhouses full of foreign-born slaves. These the rich men employed in cultivating their ground of which they dispossessed the citizens. [“Tiberius Gracchus,” The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans , Translated by John Dryden and revised by Arthur Hugh Clough. (New York: Random House, Modern Library edition, p. 997).]
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...