Slavery Quotes

Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping from them.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

Your answer is the logical, coherent answer an absolutely normal person would give: It's a tie! A lunatic, however, would say that what I have around my neck is a ridiculous, useless bit of colored cloth tied in a very complicated way, which makes it harder to get air into your lungs and difficult to turn your neck. I have to be careful when I'm anywhere near a fan, or I could be strangled by this bit of cloth.If a lunatic were to ask me what this tie is for, I would have to say, absolutely nothing. It's not even purely decorative, since nowadays it's become a symbol of slavery, power, aloofness. The only really useful function a tie serves is the sense of relief when you get home and take it off; you feel as if you've freed yourself from something, though quite what you don't know.

Paulo Coelho

Those who do not think independently are under the influence of somebody else who thinks for them. If you give your thoughts to somebody else, it is a more shameful slavery than if you give you body to someone to possess.

Leo Tolstoy

The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

Oscar Wilde

A is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of him.

George Orwell

Excess of liberty, whether it lies in state or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.

Plato

Slavery may, perhaps, be best compared to the infantile disease of measles; a complaint which so commonly attacks the young of humanity in their infancy, and when gone through at that period leaves behind it so few fatal marks; but which when it normally attacks the fully developed adult becomes one of the most virulent and toxic of diseases, often permanently poisoning the constitution where it does not end in death.

Olive Schreiner

Slavery takes hold of few, but many take hold of slavery.

Seneca (Seneca the Elder)

Thy treasures of gold Are dim with the blood of the hearts thou hast sold;Thy home may be lovely, but round it I hearThe crack of the whip, and the footsteps of fear.

Lydia Maria Child, From the anti

To relive the relationship between owner and slave we can consider how we treat our cars and dogs -- a dog exercising a somewhat similar leverage on our mercies and an automobile being comparable in value to a slave in those days.

Edward Hoagland

There is a sort of subjection which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and of love; and strength is often only another name for willing bondage to irremediable weakness.

George Eliot