Quotes & Sayings About Freedom Of Slaves

Who talks most about freedom and equality? Is it not those who hold the bill of rights in one hand and a whip for affrighted slaves in the other? — Alexander Hamilton

Seeming's enough for slaves of space and time ours is the now and here of freedom . Come — E. E. Cummings

There is nothing grand or noble in having the use of a slave, in so far as he is a slave; or in issuing commands about necessary things. But it is an error to suppose that every sort of rule is despotic like that of a master over slaves, for there is as great a difference between the rule over freemen and the rule over slaves as there is between slavery by nature and freedom by nature . — Aristotle.

Tom Paine generally took a critical stance when dealing with religion and the church, but in 1775, in an essay entitled, "Thoughts on Defensive War" he wrote as follows: "In the barbarous ages of the world, men in genernal had no liberty. the strong governed the weak a will; till the coming of Christ there was no sucht thing as political freedom in any part of the world... The Romans held the world in slavery and were themselves slaves of their emperors... Wherefore political as well as spiritual freedom is the gift of God through Christ — Edmund A. Opitz

No principle, that is possible to be named, can be more self-evidently false than this; or more self-evidently fatal to all political freedom. Yet it triumphed in the field, and is now assumed to be established. If it really be established, the number of slaves, instead of having been diminished by the war, has been greatly increased; for a man, thus subjected to a government that he does not want, is a slave. — Lysander Spooner

Even today, regardless of the quarrels women may pick in the cause of emancipation, the reality is that, in the present world order, it's the men who eventually grant emancipation, not we women ... it's the masters who freed the slave of the world, people belonging to the masterclass who fought for the cause. The slaves didn't earn their freedom by wrangling or arguing. That's the way things are. It's the law of the world: the strong emancipate the weak from the bondage of the strong. So also, men alone can liberate women. The responsibility lies with them. — Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay

Alas, put no faith in such a bond of union. interpreting freedom as the multiplication and rapid satisfaction of desires, men distort their own nature, for many senseless and foolish desires and habits and ridiculous fancies are fostered in them. They live only for mutual envy, for luxury and ostentation. To have dinners, visits, carriages, rank and slaves to wait on one is looked upon as a necessity, for which life, honor and human feeling are sacrificed, and men even commit suicide if they are unable to satisfy it. We see the same thing among those who are not rich, while the poor drown their unsatisfied need and their envy in drunkenness. But soon they will drink blood instead of wine, they are being led on to it. I ask you, is such a man free? — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Man is either governed by his own laws - freedom - or the laws of another - slavery. Are you willing to become slaves? Will you give up your freedom, your life and your property without a single struggle? No man has a right to rule over his fellow creatures. — Alexander Hamilton

For what accords better and more aptly with faith than to acknowledge ourselves divested of all virtue that we may be clothed by God, devoid of all goodness that we may be filled by him, the slaves of sin that he may give us freedom, blind that he may enlighten, lame that he may cure, and feeble that he may sustain us; to strip ourselves of all ground of glorying that he alone may shine forth glorious, and we be glorified in him? — John Calvin

She was particularly curious about the Viginians, wondering if, as slaveholders, they had the necessary commitment to the cause of freedom. "I have," she wrote, "sometimes been ready to think that the passions for liberty cannot be equally strong in the breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow creature of theirs." What she felt about those in Massachusetts who owned slaves, including her own father, she did not say, but she need not have
John knew her mind on the subject. Writing to him during the First Congress, she had been unmistakably clear: "I wish most sincerely there was not a slave in the province. It always seemed a most iniquitous scheme to me
[to] fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have. — David McCullough

This will be seen by the fact, that the slaveholders like to have their slaves spend those days just in such a manner as to make them as glad of their ending as of their beginning. Their object seems to be, to disgust their slaves with freedom, by plunging them into the lowest depths of dissipation. — Frederick Douglass

A man working for wages his whole life is not really free. That is why Jefferson said, you have to own land. Southerners said, - and they weren't being hypocritical - they said slavery is the foundation of freedom because if you own slaves, you are freer yourself. — Eric Foner

What all Greek philosophers, no matter how opposed to polis life, took for granted is that freedom is exclusively located in the political realm, that necessity is primarily a prepolitical phenomenon, characteristic of the private household organization, and that force and violence are justified in this sphere because they are the only means to master necessity - for instance, by ruling over slaves - and to become free. Because all human beings are subject to necessity, they are entitled to violence toward others; violence is the prepolitical act of liberating oneself from the necessity of life for the freedom of world. This freedom is the essential condition of what the Greeks called felicity, eudaimonia, which was an objective status depending first of all upon wealth and health. To be poor or to be in ill health meant to be subject to physical necessity, and to be a slave meant to be subject, in addition, to man-made violence. — Hannah Arendt

Regard as free not those whose status makes them outwardly free, but those who are free in their character and conduct. For we should not call men truly free when they are wicked and dissolute, since they are slaves to worldly passions. Freedom and happiness of soul consist in genuine purity and detachment from transitory things. — Anthony The Great

The Pascal of our generation puts it this way: "We run away like conscientious little bugs, scared rabbits, dancing attendance on our machines, our slaves, our masters" - clicking, scrolling, tapping, liking, sharing . . . anything. "We think we want peace and silence and freedom and leisure, but deep down we know that this would be unendurable to us." In fact, "we want to complexify our lives. We don't have to, we want to. We want to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very thing we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hole in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it."12 — Tony Reinke

Happy slaves are the bitterest enemies of freedom. — Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

Freedom is for the educated people who fought for it. We were slaves of the English, now we will be slaves of the educated Indians - or the Pakistanis. — Khushwant Singh

We become slaves the moment we hand the keys to the definition of reality entirely over to someone else, whether it is a business, an economic theory, a political party, the White House, Newsworld or CNN. — B.W. Powe

Our lack of discipline destroys our freedom. Because we try and don't train wisely, we end up being emotionally driven. We are slaves to the spectacular and the spontaneous. Most men would rather be entertained than be a part of transforming the world, and that erodes manliness and undercuts our confidence. If we can't control ourselves, then we will be controlled by everything else. The angry, domineering masculinity that is so dangerous arises in part because impotent men lack self-control. They lash out because they are frustrated that they cannot control others around them. But they do not control themselves, either, and self-control is where true freedom begins. — Darrin Patrick

How would I run with my bad leg? And what would become of the people who need my care? Besides, it doesn't mean anything for me to be free and everyone else slaves, the healer answered. Tete hadn't thought of that, and it kept buzzing around her brain like a bottlefly. She talked about it with her godmother many times, but she was never able to accept the idea that her freedom was irreparably bound to that of the other slaves. — Isabel Allende

Both Lear and Washington held fast to paternalistic assumptions about African slavery, believing that enslaved men and women were better off with a generous owner than emancipated and living independent lives. Decades later, Southerners would justify the institution of slavery with descriptions of the supposed benefits that came with enslavement. According to many Southerners, slaves were better cared for, better fed, sheltered, and treated almost as though they were members of the family. Northern emancipation left thousands of ex-slaves without assistance, and Southerners charged that free blacks were living and dying in the cold alleyways of the urban North. Many believed Northern freedom to be a far less humane existence, one that left black men and women to die in the streets from exposure and starvation. But — Erica Armstrong Dunbar

It is especially important to remember that the ownership of humans is possible too; not in terms of actual slavery, which they are proud to have abolished, but in the sense that, according to which sex and class one belongs to, one may be partially owned by another or others by having to sell one's labour or talents to somebody with the means to buy them. In the case of males, they give themselves most totally when they become soldiers; the personnel in their armed forces are like slaves, with little personal freedom, and under threat of death if they disobey. Females sell their bodies, usually, entering into the legal contract of "marriage" to Intermediates, who then pay them for their sexual favours by- — Iain Banks

If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making? — Herbert Spencer

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. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

From some things that I have said one may get the idea that some of the slaves did not want freedom. This is not true. I have never seen one who did not want to be free, or one who would return to slavery. — Booker T. Washington

Under Hudgins, Virginia law presumed blacks were slaves, denoting their status as objects even when, in fact, they were free.84 Judge Tucker undercut even the provisions in the statute that contemplated some mixed-race individuals as free, because they descended from either a white woman or a free black or mulatto female. Judges throughout the 19th century followed Judge Tucker's lead, creating presumptions of enslavement and other devices for limiting black freedom. These cases reinforced a subordinate role for blacks in American society, and in so doing, created a superior role for whites. This social construct of white privilege is unmistakably seen in the words of one South Carolina judge in 1836: "A — F. Michael Higginbotham

Look at the tyranny of party
at what is called party allegiance, party loyalty
a snare invented by designing men for selfish purposes
and which turns voters into chattels, slaves, rabbits; and all the while, their masters, and they themselves are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honestly unconscious of the fantastic contradiction; and forgetting or ignoring that their fathers and the churches shouted the same blasphemies a generation earlier when they were closing thier doors against the hunted slave, beating his handful of humane defenders with Bible-texts and billies, and pocketing the insults nad licking the shoes of his Southern master. — Mark Twain

The commerce of a free people is many times more valuable than that of slaves. Freemen produce and consume vastly more than slaves. They have therefore more to buy and more to sell. Hence the free states have a direct pecuniary interest in the civil freedom of all the other states. Commerce between free and slave states is not reciprocal or equal. — Lysander Spooner

Progressives have spent the better part of a hundred years pushing their agenda - and they've hijacked everything from our kindergartens to our colleges to do it. The more 'educated' we get, the dumber we become. And that has always been the goal. There's a reason that slave masters wanted to keep their slaves illiterate: they understood that true education makes makes people long for freedom and liberty. Today's slave masters are the professors and unions and bureaucrats in Washington who run our education system. — Glenn Beck

July 4, the day we celebrate giving our political masters independence from conscience, morality, consequences for evil doing, and basic social and economic reality.
The fireworks are the glowing tears of your children's incinerated futures.
Cheer happy slaves - your only chains are your deluded joys. Cheer and sing, because for you, songs of death are easier than questions of life. — Stefan Molyneux

As a slave one cannot undertake obligations without the consent of one's master. As a citizen one cannot undertake obligations unless the legal system of the State in which one holds citizenship permits one to do so. Neither a slave nor a citizen is a free person, although those who are held as slaves or citizens may well be free persons: it is just that their freedom is not respected. — Frank Van Dun

Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice? What is it to be born free and not to live free? What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom? Is it a freedom to be slaves, or a freedom to be free, of which we boast? We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost defences only of freedom. It is our children's children who may perchance be really free. We tax ourselves unjustly. There is a part of us which is not represented. It is taxation without representation. We quarter troops, we quarter fools and cattle of all sorts upon ourselves. We quarter our gross bodies on our poor souls, till the former eat up all the latter's substance. — Henry David Thoreau

The authority of the Church was thrown over by the authority of the state. Twenty years only have passed, and the authority of the state is already thrown over by the authority of conscience ... I fear for those yet unborn, that they are already betrayed. Robbed of the truth we can inherit, they will know their sins as only misery, and their forgiveness they will not know at all because they do not know God. Then at last men will be free of God. Then they will be slaves indeed. — Lucy Beckett

Peace purchased at the cost of any part of our national integrity is fit only for slaves, and even when purchased for such a price it is a delusion, for it cannot last. — William Borah

It was not Christianity which freed the slave: Christianity accepted slavery; Christian ministers defended it; Christian merchants trafficked in human flesh and blood, and drew their profits from the unspeakable horrors of the middle passage. Christian slaveholders treated their slaves as they did the cattle in their fields: they worked them, scourged them, mated them , parted them, and sold them at will. Abolition came with the decline in religious belief, and largely through the efforts of those who were denounced as heretics. — Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner

And by virtue of the power, and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free; and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons. — Abraham Lincoln

How can we speak of Democracy or Freedom when from the very beginning of life we mould the child to undergo tyranny, to obey a dictator? How can we expect democracy when we have reared slaves? Real freedom begins at the beginning of life, not at the adult stage. These people who have been diminished in their powers, made short-sighted, devitalized by mental fatigue, whose bodies have become distorted, whose wills have been broken by elders who say: "your will must disappear and mine prevail!"-how can we expect them, when school-life is finished, to accept and use the rights of freedom? — Maria Montessori

A billion and a half human souls, who had been given the techniques of music and the graphic arts, and the theory of technology, now had the others: philosophy and logic and love; sympathy, empathy, forbearance, unity, in the idea of their species rather than in their obedience; membership in harmony with all life everywhere.
A people with such feelings and their derived skills cannot be slaves. As the light burst upon them, there was only one concentration possible to each of them - to be free, and the accomplished feeling of being free. As each found it, he was an expert in freedom, and expert succeeded expert, transcended expert, until (in a moment) a billion and a half human souls had no greater skill than the talent of freedom. — Theodore Sturgeon

The people of Asia were slaves, because they had not learned how to pronounce the word 'no'. — Winston Churchill

In the closing years of John Wesley's life, he became a friend of William Wilberforce. In England, Wilberforce was a great champion of freedom for slaves before the American Civil War. He was subjected to a vicious campaign by slave traders and others whose powerful commercial interests were threatened. Rumors were spread that he was a wife-beater. His character, morals, and motives were repeatedly smeared during some twenty years of pitched battles. From his deathbed, John Wesley wrote to Wilberforce, "Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be won out by the opposition of men and devils; but if God be for you, who can be against you? Are all of them together stronger than God? Be not weary in well-doing." William Wilberforce never forgot those words of John Wesley. They kept him going even when all the forces of hell were arrayed against him. The — John C. Maxwell

Our enemies are Medes and Persians, men who for centuries have lived soft and luxurious lives; we of Macedon for generations past have been trained in the hard school of danger and war. Above all, we are free men, and they are slaves. There are Greek troops, to be sure, in Persian service - but how different is their cause from ours! They will be fighting for pay - and not much of at that; we, on the contrary, shall fight for Greece, and our hearts will be in it. As for our foreign troops - Thracians, Paeonians, Illyrians, Agrianes - they are the best and stoutest soldiers in Europe, and they will find as their opponents the slackest and softest of the tribes of Asia. And what, finally, of the two men in supreme command? You have Alexander, they - Darius! — Alexander The Great

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. — David Brion Davis

Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. — Herbert Marcuse

It is a sad hardship and slavery to people who live in towns, that in their movements they know of one dimension only; they walk along the line as if they were led on a string. The transition from the line to the plane into the two dimensions, when you wander across a field or through a wood, is a splendid liberation to the slaves, like the French Revolution. But in the air you are taken into the full freedom of the three dimensions; after long ages of exile and dreams the homesick heart throws itself into the arms of space. — Karen Blixen

Not slaves," said Halyard, chuckling patronizingly. "Citizens, employed by government. They have same rights as other citizens - free speech, freedom of worship, the right to vote. Before the war, they worked in the Ilium Works, controlling machines, but now machines control themselves much better. — Anonymous

Some have been ensnared in the net of excessive debt. The net of interest holds them fast, requiring them to sell their time and energies to meet the demands of creditors. They surrender their freedom, becoming slaves to their own extravagance. — Joseph B. Wirthlin

Slavery it is that makes slavery; freedom, freedom. The slavery of women happened when the men were slaves of kings. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

As a people, we have been tolled farther and farther away from the facts of what we have done by the romanticizers, whose bait is nothing more than the wishful insinuation that we have done no harm. Speaking a public language of propaganda, uninfluenced by the real content of our history which we know only in a deep and guarded privacy, we are still in the throes of the paradox of the "gentleman and soldier."
However conscious it may have been, there is no doubt in my mind that all this moral and verbal obfuscation is intentional. Nor do I doubt that its purpose is to shelter us from the moral anguish implicit in our racism - an anguish that began, deep and mute, in the minds of Christian democratic freedom-loving owners of slaves. — Wendell Berry

Men talk of freedom! How many are free to think? Free from fear, from perturbation, from prejudice? Nine hundred and ninety-nine in a thousand are perfect slaves. — Henry David Thoreau

During the battle, Spartacus himself tried with frenzied
determination, the symbolism of which is obvious, to reach Crassus, who was commanding the Roman
legions. He wanted to perish, but in single combat with the man who symbolized, at that moment, every
Roman master; it was his dearest wish to die, but in absolute equality. He did not reach Crassus:
principles wage war at a distance and the Roman general kept himself apart. Spartacus died, as he wished,
but at the hands of mercenaries, slaves like himself, who killed their own freedom with his. In revenge for
the one crucified citizen, Crassus crucified thousands of slaves. The six thousand crosses which, after
such a just rebellion, staked out the road from Capua to Rome demonstrated to the servile crowd that
there is no equality in the world of power and that the masters calculate, at a usurious rate, the price of
their own blood. — Albert Camus

War is father of all, and king of all. He renders some gods, others men; he makes some slaves, others free. — Heraclitus

Most Britons still lived and died without encountering anyone whose skin colour was different from their own. Slaves, in short, did not threaten, at least as far as the British at home were concerned. Bestowing freedom upon them seemed therefore purely an act of humanity and will, an achievement that would be to Great Britain's economic detriment, perhaps, but would have few other domestic consequences. — Linda Colley

A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote. — Henry David Thoreau

One of the lesser-known contributions of the great Harriet Tubman was the devotion of her life after the war to a similar project. The woman who personally led three hundred slaves to freedom, who was a spy and "general" for the Union, spent her final years trying to establish the John Brown Home for the Aged. When the government refused to give her a full veteran's pension, the former general sold fruit and had a biography published to raise money for the institution. — Paula J. Giddings

Nearly all men are slaves for the same reason that the Spartans assigned for the servitude of the Persians
lack of power to pronounce the syllable, "No." To be able to utter that word and live alone, are the only means to preserve one's freedom and one's character. — Nicolas Chamfort

Vocational training is the training of animals or slaves. It fits them to become cogs in the industrial machine. Free men need liberal education to prepare them to make a good use of their freedom. — John Dewey

Freedom to creat and construct, to wonder and to venture. Such freedom requires that the individual be active and responsible, not a slave or a well-fed cog in the machine ... It is not enough that men are not slaves; if social conditions further the existence of automatons, the result will not be love of life, but love of death. — Erich Fromm

It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master. — Ayn Rand

God is God of history and of nations. Also of nature. Originally Yahweh was probably a volcanic deity. But he periodically enters history, the best example being when he intervened to bring the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt and to the Promised Land.
They were shepherds and accustomed to freedom; it was terrible for them to be making bricks. And the Pharaoh had them gathering the straw as well and still being required to meet their quota of bricks per day. It is an archetypal timeless situation. God bringing men out of slavery and into freedom. Pharaoh represents all tyrants at all times. Her voice was calm and reasonable; Asher felt impressed. — Philip K. Dick

The supreme nobility of a Roman emperor does not consist in being a master of slaves, but in being a lord of free men, who loves freedom even in those who serve him. — Julius Evola

Freedom is a state of mind, I said wondering where I'd heard it before, not a state of being. We are all slaves to gravity and morality and the vicissitudes of nature. Our genes govern us much more than we'd like to think. Our bodies can not know absolute freedom but our minds can, can at least try. — Walter Mosley

I got me slave-girls and slaves.' For what price, tell me? What did you find in existence worth as much as this human nature? What price did you put on rationality? How many obols did you reckon the equivalent of the likeness of God? How many staters did you get for selling that being shaped by God? God said, Let us make man in our own image and likeness. If he is in the likeness of God, and rules the whole earth, and has been granted authority over everything on earth from God, who is his buyer, tell me? Who is his seller? To God alone belongs this power; or, rather, not even to God himself. For his gracious gifts, it says, are irrevocable. God would not therefore reduce the human race to slavery, since he himself, when we had been enslaved to sin, spontaneously recalled us to freedom. But if God does not enslave what is free, who is he that sets his own power above God's? — Gregory Of Nyssa

Go forth! Carry the good tidings to the poor, bind the wounds of the brokenhearted, proclaim freedom to slaves, open the doors of prisons to those within, promulgate the year of the Lord's mercy ... Bring into the world the hope of God, which is Christ the Lord Who rose from the dead and lives and reigns forever. — Pope Benedict XVI

Slaves do not have the bravery of free men. — Pierce Brown

The 1860s ushered in a number of changes that profoundly transformed the nation. While the emancipation of enslaved people and the increased resettlement of Native Americans represent critical turning points in the political, legal, social, and economic history of the United States, these transformations produced devastating and unanticipated consequences. When soldiers in the North reached for the rifles that hung above the mantles of their front doors and marched off to war, they did so in the name of ending slavery. But in the effort to dismantle the institution of slavery, very few considered how ex-slaves would survive the war and emancipation. An abstract idea about freedom became a flesh-and-blood reality in which epidemic outbreaks, poverty, and suffering threatened former bondspeople as they abandoned slavery and made their way toward freedom. The — Jim Downs

I know that of all the great shifts that have occurred in America
the freedom of slaves, the rights of women, the equality of gays and lesbians
none has happened easily, and certainly none has happened instantly and without serious attacks and backlash. But the reason we have these things is because the fair-minded people who came before us would not give up. In my life, I have seen elections stolen
either outright or through the electoral college. I have seen wars fought because there was no other way to get peace. I have seen the rich get richer and I have seen the poor get poorer. I have seen facts get harder and harder to hide
and easier and easier to manipulate. I have been angry and I have been frustrated and I have been ecstatic and I have been proven right and wrong and back again. I have given up on some things, but I have refused to give up on most things. And I can honestly say that all of it
all of it
seems to have led me to where we are, here and now. — David Levithan

If a piece of burning charcoal be placed on a man's head, see how he struggles to throw it off. Similar will be the struggle for freedom of those who really understand that they are slaves of nature. — Swami Vivekananda

The sum of all is, if we would most truly enjoy the gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people; then shall we both deserve and enjoy it. While on the other hand, if we are universally vicious and debauched in our manners, though the form of our Constitution carries the face of the most exalted freedom, we shall in reality be the most abject slaves. — Samuel Adams

Struggles among Roman patricians, plebeians, and slaves produced a version of the chordal triad universalized around a notion of libertas. Different notes of the chord were dominant from the Republic to the Empire. The slave's point of view was made prominent in the figure of Epictetus, one of the few major Roman theorists born a slave. By the Middle Ages, freedom had attained a spiritual dimension but was still linked to the political. With medieval Christendom came the triumph of the sovereignal conception of freedom. That triumph coincided with theocratic societal decadence, the doctrine of heresy, the transformation of mass slavery into the political language of serfdom, and the introduction of the root word Slav to refer to serfs across Europe. Heretics privileged their personal freedom over sovereign orthodoxy. Being burned at the stake was a consequence. — Neil Roberts

The very flag of freedom that waves over our heads is formed from material cultivated by slaves, on soil moistened with their blood drawn from them by the whip of a republican taskmaster! — Elijah Parish Lovejoy

I think of the old slavery, and of the way The Economy has now improved upon it. The new slavery has improved upon the old by giving the new slaves the illusion that they are free. The Economy does not take people's freedom by force, which would be against its principles, for it is very humane. It buys their freedom, pays for it, and then persuades its money back again with shoddy goods and the promise of freedom. "Buy a car," it says, "and be free. Buy a boat and be free." Is this not the raw material of bad dreams? Or is it maybe the very nightmare itself? — Wendell Berry

The tyranny of necessity grants its slaves three kinds of freedom: opinion free from intellect, entertainment free from art, and orgies free from love. — Karl Kraus

As slaves we were this country's first windfall, the down payment on its freedom. After the ruin and liberation of the Civil War came Redemption for the unrepentant South and Reunion, and our bodies became this country's second mortgage. In the New Deal we were their guestroom, their finished basement. And today, with a sprawling prison system, which has turned the warehousing of black bodies into a jobs program for Dreamers and a lucrative investment for Dreamers; today, when 8 percent of the world's prisoners are black men, our bodies have refinanced the Dream of being white. Black life is cheap, but in America black bodies are a natural resource of incomparable value. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

In America, we have achieved the Orwellian prediction - enslaved, the people have been programmed to love their bondage and are left to clutch only mirage-like images of freedom, its fables and fictions. The new slaves are linked together by vast electronic chains of television that imprison not their bodies but their minds. Their desires are programmed, their tastes manipulated, their values set for them. — Gerry Spence

Things I learned from a man called "The Nazarene"
1- Being poor does not equal being miserable.
2- People will judge you, but their judgment should not define who you are.
3- Going against what others hold as true is not necessarily a bad thing.
4- Everyone is sacred.
5- Life is sometimes a lonely and dry place, like desert, but those times are there to help us meditate on what is truly important in our lives.
6- Complaining or getting angry because there is a storm in our lives solves nothing; embrace the storm and keep calm.
7- Treasure and protect the children of the world, they hold the key of what is pure and innocent; they are the way to freedom.
8- We are free to be who we want to be, it is our choice to be slaves or kings.
9- Fear nothing.
10- The person you don't like is also your neighbor.
11- The words following "I AM" define who we are, we must choose wisely. — Martin Suarez

Slaves are governed by the fear of man, and, whenever the fear of man replaces the fear of God in a society, slavery reappears and increases. — Rousas John Rushdoony

They were empowered and fulfilled. They dated occasionally but were just as happy living the feminist dream of a professional woman not answerable to any man. Do what they wanted to, go where they wanted to and spend indecent amount of money on clothes and shoes, it was all good. There were not slaves to diets, shaving hairy legs, waxing eyebrows, dying their roots, endless showers, applying tons of make-up and trying to be domestic goddesses. They could slum around in leisure suits and runners reading Cosmo with a fag in their mouth and a cup of coffee in their hands. There could be slummy mummies or tidy queens or takeaway junkies it all depended on their daily rota and social live. Good, freedom was definitely good. One husband in a lifetime was enough for them — Annette J. Dunlea

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves. — Henry David Thoreau

What if a king made bad laws; laws so unnatural that a country broke them by declaring its freedom?" He threw his arms in the air. "Now you are spouting nonsense. Two slaves running away from their rightful master is not the same as America wanting to be free of England. Not the same at all." "How is it then that the British offer freedom to escaped slaves, but the Patriots don't? — Laurie Halse Anderson

Do you know when people really become spiritual? It is when they become the slaves of God and are branded with His sign, which is the sign of the Cross, in token that they have given Him their freedom. — Teresa Of Avila

But slaves that once conceive the glowing thought Of freedom, in that hope itself possess All that the contest calls for; spirit, strength, The scorn of danger, and united hearts, The surest presage of the good they seek. — William Cowper

Freedom, to be desirable, involves kindness, wisdom, and all the virtues of the free; but the free man as we have seen him in action has been, as of yore, only the master of many helots; and the slaves are still ill-fed, ill-clad, ill-taught, ill-housed, insolently treated, and driven to their mines and workshops by the lash of famine. — Robert Louis Stevenson

The world is filled with people who are no longer needed - and who try to make slaves of all of us - and they have their music and we have ours. Theirs, the wasted songs of a superstitious nightmare - and without their musical and ideological miscar-riages to compare our Song of freedom to, we'd not have any opposite to compare music with - and like the drifting wind, hitting against no obstacle, we'd never knows its speed, its power. — Woodie Gurthie

Writing about our life in the House of Arcamand in the City State of Etra, I fall back into it and see it as I saw it then, from inside and from below, with nothing to compare it to, and as if it were the only way things could possibly be. Children see the world that way. So do most slaves. Freedom is largely a matter of seeing that there are alternatives. — Ursula K. Le Guin

They'd been improving the machinery of slavery for two centuries, inventing new tortures to make people work harder and longer. Stripping slaves of their names, their families, their spirits. This is where it went next: people with no bloodline, people with no past and no future, people with no claim to freedom. — Ben H. Winters

Happiness, as far as we are concerned, is achieved through living a meaningful life, a life that is filled with passion and freedom, a life in which we can grow as individuals and contribute to other people in meaningful ways. Growth and contribution: those are the bedrocks of happiness. Not stuff. This may not sound sexy or marketable or sellable, but it's the cold truth. Humans are happy if we are growing as individuals and if we are contributing beyond ourselves. Without growth, and without a deliberate effort to help others, we are just slaves to cultural expectations, ensnared by the trappings of money and power and status and perceived success. — Joshua Fields Millburn

...only the one who knows and practices the iconoclastic fury of destruction can possess the joy born of freedom, of that unique freedom fertilized by sorrow. I rise up against the reality of the outer world for the triumph of the reality of my inner world. I reject society for the triumph of the I. I reject the stability of every rule, every custom, every morality, for the affirmation of every willful instinct, all free emotionality, every passion and every fantasy. I mock at every duty and every right so I can sing free will. I scorn the future to suffer and enjoy my good and my bad in the present. I despise humanity because it is not my humanity. I hate tyrants and I detest slaves. I don't want and I don't grant solidarity, because I am convinced that it is a new chain, and because I believe with Ibsen that the one who is most alone is the strongest one. This is my Nihilism. — Renzo Novatore

In American terms, the accomplishment of Genghis Khan might be understood if the United States, instead of being created by a group of educated merchants or wealthy planters, had been founded by one of its illiterate slaves, who, by sheer force of personality, charisma, and determination, liberated America from foreign rule, united the people, created an alphabet, wrote the constitution, established universal religious freedom, invented a new system of warfare, marched an army from Canada to Brazil, and opened roads of commerce in a free-trade zone that stretched across the continents. — Jack Weatherford

Freedom is the only real doctor of the sick slaves; and a good conscience, of the ill masters! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

But before we cue the brass section to blare "The Stars and Stripes Forever," it might be worth taking another moment of melancholy silence to mourn the thwarted reconciliation with the mother country and what might have been. Anyone who accepts the patriots' premise that all men are created equal must come to terms with the fact that the most obvious threat to equality in eighteenth-century North America was not taxation without representation but slavery. Parliament would abolish slavery in the British Empire in 1833, thirty years before President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. A return to the British fold in 1776 might have freed American slaves three decades sooner, which is what, a generation and a half? Was independence for some of us more valuable than freedom for all of us? As the former slave Frederick Douglass put it in an Independence Day speech in 1852, "This is your Fourth of July, not mine. — Sarah Vowell

This is the beginning of a new time," Torius said, "a great moment for us. One of us has learnt the Tongue and freed a princess. I have saved him and killed the guards. No longer will we be slaves. No longer will the guards tell us what to do. No longer will we listen. We will fight till we get what we want!"
A roar exploded from the children around him.
"This is a revolution," Torius went on. "You all remember the pain that you have felt when the guards have touched you. You all know the shame we carry within us at being treated like this. No more! We will stand! — Y.K. Willemse

There are free men with the spirit of a slave, and slaves whose spirit is full of freedom. He who is true to his inner self is a free man, while he whose entire life is merely a stage for what is good and beautiful in the eyes of others, is a slave. — Abraham Isaac Kook

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation.
Yes we can.
It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom through the darkest of nights.
Yes we can.
It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness.
Yes we can.
It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.
Yes we can to justice and equality. Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity. Yes we can heal this nation. Yes we can repair this world. Yes we can — Barack Obama

Julian was not insensible of the advantages of freedom. From his studies he had imbibed the spirit of ancient sages and heroes; his life and fortunes had depended on the caprice of a tyrant; and, when he ascended the throne, his pride was sometimes mortified by the reflection that the slaves who would not dare to censure his defects were not worthy to applaud his virtues. — Edward Gibbon

Nevermore shall men make slaves of others! Not in Asgard
not on Earth
not any place where the hammer of Thor can be swung
or where men of good faith hold freedom dear! — Stan Lee

This "freedom" put a proud people in chains
And turned free men into slaves
"Independence" made us weak
And slaughtered us
In the name of kindness
This is democracy by the whip
And the fear of chains
With a whirlwind at its core — Abdul Salam Zaeef

While I was fighting, I heard other people speaking in the name of freedom, and the more they defended this unique right, the more enslaved they seemed to be to their parents' wishes, to a marriage in which they had promised to stay with the other person "for the rest of their lives," to the bathroom scales, to their diet, to half-finished projects, to lovers to whom they were incapable of saying "No" or "It's over," to weekends when they were obliged to have lunch with people they didn't even like. Slaves to luxury, to the appearance of luxury, to the appearance of the appearance of luxury. Slaves to a life they had not chosen, but which they had decided to live because someone had managed to convince them that it was all for the best. And so their identical days and nights passed, days and nights in which adventure was just a word in a book or an image on the television that was always on, and whenever a door opened, they would say: "I'm not interested. I'm not in the mood. — Paulo Coelho

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. — George Lakoff

There can be no freedom of the individual, no democracy, without the capital system, the profit system, the private enterprise system. These are, in the end, inseparable. Those who would destroy freedom have only first to destroy the hope of gain, the profit of enterprise and risk-taking, the hope of accumulating capital, the hope to save something for one's old age and for one's children. For a community of men without property, and without the hope of getting it by honest effort, is a community of slaves of a despotic State. — Russell Cornell Leffingwell

By declaring our Prophet infallible and not permitting ourselves to question him, we Muslims had set up a static tyranny. The Prophet Muhammad attempted to legislate every aspect of life. By adhering to his rules of what is permitted and what is forbidden, we Muslims supressed the freedom to think for ourselves and to act as we chose. We froze the moral outlook of billions of people into the mind-set of the Arab desert in the seventh century. We were not just servants of Allah, we were slaves. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali