Slave quotes

“I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.” Frederick Douglass

“Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work.” Frederick Douglass

“What to the Slave is the 4th of July.” Frederick Douglass

“I could, as a free man, look across the bay toward the Eastern Shore where I was born a slave.” Frederick Douglass

“Fugitive slaves were rare then, and as a fugitive slave lecturer, I had the advantage of being the first one out.” Frederick Douglass

“Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.” Charles Darwin

“Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.” Bertrand Russell

“The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.” Bertrand Russell

“I must create a system or be enslaved by another mans; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.” William Blake

“You cannot have Liberty in this world without what you call Moral Virtue, and you cannot have Moral Virtue without the slavery of that half of the human race who hate what you call Moral Virtue.” William Blake

“Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.” Vincent Van Gogh

“For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.” Jonathan Swift

“Racism, xenophobia and unfair discrimination have spawned slavery, when human beings have bought and sold and owned and branded fellow human beings as if they were so many beasts of burden.” Desmond Tutu

“In the Bible, we first encounter God when he sides with a bunch of slaves against a powerful Pharaoh, an act of grace freely given.” Desmond Tutu

“Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.” Andy Warhol

“To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.” Virginia Woolf

“For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?” Virginia Woolf

“A free America... means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call democracy is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it.” Frank Lloyd Wright

“Oh while I live, to be the ruler of life, not a slave, to meet life as a powerful conqueror, and nothing exterior to me will ever take command of me.” Walt Whitman

“Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil.” Edmund Burke

“Marriage, n: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.” Ambrose Bierce

“Debt, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver.” Ambrose Bierce

“I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money - has turned himself into a slave.” Joseph Campbell