Slave Morality Quotes & Sayings

Anyone we come in contact with, we either offer them life, or we drain them. — Brennan Manning

We go through life discovering the truth about who we are and determining who has earned the right to share the space within our heart. And now I simply want to share what I've been given. I want to continue to encourage as many people as I can to open their hearts to life, because if I know anything for sure, it's that opening my heart is what has brought memory greatest success and joy. — Oprah Winfrey

Another root of our malady is our loss of the sense of the worth and dignity of the human being. Nietzsche predicted this when he pointed out that the individual was being swallowed up in the herd, and that we were living by a "slave-morality." Marx also predicted it when he proclaimed that modern man was being "de-humanized," and Kafka showed in his amazing stories how people literally can lose their identity as persons. — Rollo May

The law says you have the right to hold a nigger, but begging the law's pardon, it lies ... Is everything right because the law allows it? Suppose they'd pass a law taking away your liberty and making you a slave? — Solomon Northup

At this moment, I saw more clearly than ever the brutalizing effects of slavery upon the slave and slaveholder. — Frederick Douglass

A free man is not a slave who has escaped his master; such a man is but a runaway slave who may be caught and returned to servitude. A free man, though he may be overpowered, may be killed, cannot be reduced to servitude; something in him asserts freedom as an inviolable right.
It is not negotiable.
He does not *ask* that others respect his right, he *requires* it; and it is ultimately his willingness to die for this freedom which forms the basis of his demand that others respect it. — Allen Wheelis

Master-morality and Slave-morality. — Friedrich Nietzsche

As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I'll tell you. It is because socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on horseback. The slaves won't stand for it. They are too many, and willy-nilly they'll drag down the would-be equestrian before he gets astride. You can't get away from them, and you'll have to swallow the whole slave-morality. It's not a nice mess, I'll allow. But it's been a-brewing and swallow it you must. — Jack London

Geez, Ginger! What do I have to do to prove myself to you? — Wendy Higgins

While every aristocratic morality springs from a triumphant affirmation of its own demands, the slave morality says "no" from the very outset to what is "outside itself," "different from itself," and "not itself: and this "no" is its creative deed. This — Friedrich Nietzsche

Rand, Huxley, Orwell, and Bradbury foresaw much of today's dystopian world: its spiritual and moral emptiness, its culture of consumerism, its flat-souled Last Manishness, its debasement of language, its doublethink, its illiteracy, and its bovine tolerance of authoritarian indignities. But they did not foresee the most serious and catastrophic of today's problems: the eminent destruction of whites, and western culture.

None of them thought to deal with race at all. Why is this? Probably for the simple reason that it never occurred to any of them that whites might take slave morality so far as to actually will their own destruction. As always, the truth is stranger than fiction. — Jef Costello

If you notice, the moral law in the other legal codes separates people (the Laws of Manu, the caste system, the Code of Hammurabi with the slave/owner distinction). In Islam, the violator is inferior to the obedient one. By contrast, in the Hebrew-Christian tradition, the law unifies people. No one is made righteous before God by keeping the law. It is only following redemption that we can truly understand the moral law for what it is
a mirror that indicts and calls the heart to seek God's help. This makes moral reasoning the fruit of spiritual understanding and not the cause of it. — Ravi Zacharias

What you shun enduring yourself, attempt not to impose on others. You shun slavery- beware enslaving others! If you can endure to do that, one would think you had been once upon a time a slave yourself. For vice has nothing in common with virtue, nor Freedom with slavery. — Epictetus

I'm happy to be reminded that an ordinary day full of nothing but nothingness can make you feel like you've won the lottery. — Susan Orlean

Ideas are more dangerous than an unsheathed sword in this world, half of them are forbidden, the other half would lead a man to question the very place of the earth itself, safe at the center of the universe. — Philippa Gregory

There must be sophistry in all this; but the condition of a slave confuses all principles of morality, and, in fact, renders the practice of them impossible. — Harriet Ann Jacobs

When the movie comes to an end, you are not totally the same person you are when you started the movie. — Eckhart Tolle

Some say that because the United States was wrong before, it cannot possibly be right now, or has not the right to be right. (The British Empire sent a fleet to Africa and the Caribbean to maintain the slave trade while the very same empire later sent another fleet to enforce abolition. I would not have opposed the second policy because of my objections to the first; rather it seems to me that the second policy was morally necessitated by its predecessor.) — Christopher Hitchens

The mind is constituted to accept the god of the more powerful. If you have to choose between the god of the slave owner and the god of the enslaved, naturally you will choose the former ... — Barry Unsworth

You are not what others think you are. You are what God knows you are. — Shannon L. Alder

Lenin refused to recognise moral norms established by slave-owners for their slaves and never observed by the slave-owners themselves; he called upon the Proletariat to extend the class struggle into the moral sphere too. Who fawns before the precepts established by the enemy will never vanquish that enemy! — Leon Trotsky

While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is "outside," what is "different," what is "not itself"; and this No is its creative deed. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The best thing about improvements in health care is that all the climate-change deniers are now going to live long enough to see how wrong they were. — Joseph J. Romm

There's something about writing that demands a leave-taking, an abandonment of the world, paradoxically, in order to see it clearly. This retreat has to be accomplished without severing the vital connection to the world, and to people, that feeds the imagination. It's a difficult balance. And here is where these ruminations about writing touch on morality. The same constraints to writing well are also constraints to living fully. Not to be a slave to fashion or commerce, not to succumb to arid self-censorship, not to bow to popular opinion - what is all that but a description of the educated, enlightened life? — Jeffrey Eugenides

By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? — Walter Rodney

I'm your responsiblity now. You created me. You made me this way. This is your fucking mess. If you suddenly care about morality, then don't make me go. Let me stay. I'll be your slave. I'll be your whore. I'll never fight you. I won't disobey. Whatever you want, just don't make me go back. Please. I can't live in that world anymore. You know it's true. I just want to be yours. — Kitty Thomas

What [Nietzsche] calls slave morality is to him purely spite-morality; and this spite-morality gave new names to all ideals. Thus impotence, which offers no reprisal, became goodness; craven baseness became humility; submission to him who was feared became obedience; inability to assert one's self became reluctance to assert one's self, became forgiveness, love of one's enemies. Misery became a distinction — Georg Brandes

Jessica, of course, who feels no human emotions, forgets that her whole family was about to be massacred and is already thinking about the men she will attract on the island. — Robin Hardwick

Christian religion defines morality by a belief system based on a master-slave relationship, and rooted in resentment of the raw beauty and power of the life force. — John Lamb Lash

The State is the absolute reality and the individual himself has objective existence, truth and morality only in his capacity as a member of the State. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will. With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion. — Steven Weinberg

What is that?"
"A hunt," Puck replied, looking off into the distance. He grimaced. "You know, I was just thinking we needed to be run down like rabbits and torn apart. My day just isn't complete without something trying to kill me."
-Puck — Julie Kagawa

Dostoevsky preaches the morality of the pariah, the morality of the slave. — Georg Brandes

Lacanian theory must be understood as a kind of slave morality. — Judith Butler

You have chosen to risk your lives for the defense of this country. I will not insult you by saying that you are dedicated to selfless service
it is not a virtue in my morality. In my morality, the defense of one's country means that a man is personally unwilling to live as the conquered slave of any enemy, foreign or domestic. This is an enormous virtue. — Ayn Rand