I build no system. I ask an end to privilege, the abolition of slavery, equality of rights, and the reign of law. Justice, nothing else; that is the alpha and omega of my argument: to others I leave the business of governing the world.
The world is fast learning that of all forms of slavery there is none that is so harmful and degrading as that form of slavery which tempts one human being to hate another by reason of his race or color. One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.
Miss Goldman is a communist; I am an individualist. She wishes to destroy the right of property, I wish to assert it. I make my war upon privilege and authority, whereby the right of property, the true right in that which is proper to the individual, is annihilated. She believes that co-operation would entirely supplant competition; I hold that competition in one form or another will always exist, and that it is highly desirable it should. But whether she or I be right, or both of us be wrong, of one thing I am sure; the spirit which animates Emma Goldman is the only one which will emancipate the slave from his slavery, the tyrant from his tyranny — the spirit which is willing to dare and suffer.
The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price and be bought for it.
Except by mastership and servantship, there is no conceivable deliverance from tyranny and slavery.
Malim inquietam libertatem quam quietum servitium=--I would prefer turbulent liberty to quiet slavery.
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.]
Ever since I arrived to a state of manhood, I have felt a sincere passion for liberty. The history of nations doomed to perpetual slavery, in consequence of yielding up to tyrants their natural born liberties, I read with a sort of philosophical horror; so that the first systematical and bloody attempt at Lexington, to enslave America, thoroughly electrified my mind, and fully determined me to take part with my country.
Industrial Capitalism may be defined as the corruption of a system which has always been admitted by European men — the system of private property. It has flourished under the protection which law and custom have extended to private property in essence, yet it has degraded property, allowing the swallowing up of the small man by the big one and the concentration of control in few and unworthy hands. Nevertheless, from the idea of private property did it spring, and by the remaining sanctity of private property is it protected. So also is it with that accompaniment of private property as an institution, the freedom of the family and the individual; freedom to make contracts and decide upon one’s own activities. The great proletarian body of working men, now in such violent protest against the capitalist system, owe their existence to such freedom — though by the very exercise of that freedom they have largely lost it. They were free to accept such and such wages, or to refuse them; to drive their own bargain; in practice this has reduced them to the half-slavery we see around us. But freedom is still our social theory — and by its very operation we are creating those great monopolies which are the negation of freedom. Most men who protest against modern capitalism would still preserve property and freedom. Some, more clear-sighted than the rest, demand reforms which shall re-establish the old freedom and the old well-divided property among men and undo the evils of modern capitalism by returning to what were always the first principles of our civilization. But there is another spirit abroad which would undo the evils of capitalism by destroying the right to property and by destroying freedom. It would vest control in the officers of the State, reducing all men to a common slavery for the advantage of equal distribution and for ending the existing injustice. That demand, growing in volume, successfully rooted at last in one great state — Russia — made openly by small well-organized minorities on every side, threatens the very nature of our society: and against the Communist and his ideal society is now at war. [ Cranmer: Archbishop of Canterbury 1533 – 1556 . Philadelphia & London: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1931, pp. 58-59.]
Duty, especially out of the domain of love, is the veriest slavery in the world.
There must be no compromise with slavery — none whatever. Nothing is gained, everything is lost, by subordinating principle to expedience. [ The Liberator. ]
Therefore the dignity of the human person normally demands the right to the use of earthly goods as the natural foundation for a livelihood; and to that right corresponds the fundamental obligation to grant private property, as far as possible, to all. The positive laws regulating private property may change and may grant a more or less restricted use of it; but if such legal provisions are to contribute to the peaceful state of the community, they must save the worker, who is or will be the father of a family, from being condemned to an economic dependence or slavery irreconcilable with his rights as a person. Whether this slavery arises from the tyranny of private capital or from the power of the State makes no difference to its effect; indeed under the oppression of a State which controls everything and regulates the whole of public and private life, which encroaches even upon the sphere of thought, conviction, and conscience, this lack of freedom may have consequences even more disastrous, as experience shows. [Christmas Broadcast, “The Rights of Man,” 1942.]
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
This was done to you by men and women whose only desire was to enslave you; they have succeeded so well that you are proud of your slavery.
"Man's inhumanity to man" is not the last word. The truth lies deeper. It is economic slavery, the savage struggle for a crumb, that has converted mankind into wolves and sheep.
The one intolerable sort of slavery, over which the very gods weep, is the slavery of the strong to the weak; of the great and noble-minded to the small and mean; the slavery of wisdom to folly.
It is of inestimable importance that the classical and biblical traditions linked slavery with original sin, punishment <...>, the later abolition of slavery became tied with personal and collective freedom, with the redemption from sin, with the romanticizing of many form of labor, and with the ultimate salvation of humankind.
[P]olitical democracy cannot flourish under all economic conditions. Democracy requires an economic system which supports the political ideals of liberty and equality for all. Men cannot exercise freedom in the political sphere when they are deprived of it in the economic sphere. John Adams and Alexander Hamilton observed that a man who is dependent for his subsistence on the arbitrary will of another man is not economically free and so should not be admitted to citizenship because he cannot use the political liberty which belongs to that status. If they had stated this point as a prediction, it would have been confirmed by later historic facts. The progressive political enfranchisement of the working classes has followed their progressive economic emancipation from slavery and serfdom, or from abject dependence on their employers. [Preface by Adler in The Capitalist Manifesto
You cannot abolish slavery by Act of Parliament, but can only abolish the name of it, which is very little.
There is properly but one slavery in the world--the slavery of wisdom to folly.
Let us consider that arbitrary power has seldom or never been introduced into any country at once. It must be introduced by slow degrees, and as it were step by step, lest the people should see it approach. The barriers and fences of the people’s liberty must be plucked one by one, and some plausible pretenses must be found for removing or hoodwinking, one after another, those sentries who are posted by the constitution of a free country for warning the people of their danger. When these preparatory steps are once made, the people may then indeed, with regret, see slavery and arbitrary power making long strides over their land; but it will be too late to think of preventing or avoiding the impending ruin. [ Miscellaneous Works , Vol. IV, 1779.]
My voice is still for war. Gods! can a Roman senate long debate Which of the two to choose, slavery or death?
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.]
Serving one's own passions is the greatest slavery.
Wo innen Sklaverei ist, wird sie von aussen bald kommen=--Where there is slavery in the heart, it will soon show itself in the outward conduct.
<...> black slavery was basic and integral to the entire phenomenon we call “America.” This often hidden or disguised truth ultimately involves the profound contradiction of a free society that was made possible by black slave labor.
Fallitur, egregio quisquis sub principe credit / Servitium. Nunquam libertas gratior extat / Quam sub rege pio=--Whoso thinks it slavery to serve under an eminent prince is mistaken. Liberty is never sweeter than under a pious king.
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.]
"Disguise thyself as thou wilt, still, Slavery," said I, "still thou art a bitter draught."
_Office of Jesus Christ._--He alone was to produce a great people, elect, holy, and chosen, to lead it, to nourish it, to bring it into a place of rest and holiness, to make it holy to God, to make it the temple of God, to reconcile it to God, to save it from the wrath of God, to deliver it from the slavery of sin, which visibly reigns in man, to give laws to this people, to engrave these laws on their heart, to offer himself to God for them, to sacrifice himself for them, to be a victim without spot, himself the priest, needing to offer himself, his body and his blood, and yet to offer bread and wine to God....
Disguise thyself as thou wilt, still, Slavery, thou art a bitter draught.
Her father loved me; oft invited me; Still question'd me the story of my life, From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes, That I have passed. I ran it through, even from my boyish days, To the very moment that he bade me tell it: Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances, Of moving accidents by flood and field, Of hair-breadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly breach, Of being taken by the insolent foe And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence And portance in my travels' history; Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle, Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven, It was my hint to speak,--such was the process; And of the Cannibals that each other eat, The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders. This to hear Would Desdemona seriously incline.
One world, one mankind cannot exist in the face of six, four or even two scales of values: We shall be torn apart by this disparity of rhythm, this disparity of vibrations.… Our 20th Century has proved to be more cruel than preceding centuries, and the first fifty years have not erased all its horrors; our world is rent asunder by those same old cave-age emotions of greed, envy, lack of control, mutual hostility which have picked up in passing respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, radical conflict, struggle of the masses, trade-union disputes. The primeval refusal to accept a compromise has been turned into a theoretical principle and is considered the virtue of orthodoxy. It demands millions of sacrifices in ceaseless civil wars, it drums into our souls that there is no such thing as unchanging, universal concepts of goodness and justice, that they are all fluctuating and inconstant.… Violence, less and less embarrassed by the limits imposed by centuries of lawfulness, is brazenly and victoriously striding across the whole world, unconcerned that its infertility has been demonstrated and proved many times in history. What is more, it is not simply crude power that triumphs abroad, but its exultant justification. The world is being inundated by the brazen conviction that power can do anything, justice nothing.… The young, at an age when they have not yet any experience other than sexual, when they do not yet have years of personal suffering and personal understanding behind them, are jubilantly repeating our depraved Russian blunders of the 19th Century, under the impression that they are discovering something new. They acclaim the latest wretched degradation on the part of the Chinese Red Guards as a joyous example. In shallow lack of understanding of the age-old essence of mankind, in the naive confidence of inexperienced hearts they cry: Let us drive away those cruel, greedy oppressors, governments, and the new ones (we), having just laid aside grenades and rifles, will be just and understanding. Far from it.… But of those who have lived more and understand, those who could oppose these young—many do not dare oppose, they even suck up, anything not to appear conservative. Another Russian phenomenon of the 19th Century which Dostoyevsky called slavery to progressive quirks.… The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles.… The price of cowardice will only be evil. We shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices. [ The Wall Street Journal , September 6, 1972, p. 14.]
This is a nation of runaways. Every person comes from somewhere else. Even the Indians, they run once upon a time across the Alaskan land bridge. The blacks, they maybe didn't run from Africa, okay, but they ran from slavery. And the rest of us, we all ran from something. From the church, the state, the parents, the Irish potato bug. And I think this is why Americans are so restless.
There is a great difference between disciples and true disciples. They are recognised by saying to them that the truth will make them free; for if they answer that they are free, and that it is in their power to come out of slavery to the devil, they are indeed disciples, but not true disciples.
I shall oppose all slavery extension and all increase of slave representation in all places, at all times, under all circumstances, even against all inducements, against all supposed limitations of great interests, against all combinations, against all compromises. [Senate address, Oregon debate.]
Conscious faith is freedom. Emotional faith is slavery. Mechanical faith is foolishness.
She’s got so many azalea bushes, her yard’s going to look like Gone With the Wind come spring. I don’t like azaleas and I sure didn’t like that movie, the way they made slavery look like a big happy tea party. If I’d played Mammy, I’d of told Scarlett to stick those green draperies up her white little pooper. Make her own damn man-catching dress.
That [slavery] is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles — right and wrong — throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, “You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.” No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle. [Lincoln-Douglas Debate, October 15, 1858, Alton, Illinois.]
<...> many national leaders including Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, John Adams, John Jay, Gouverneur Morris, and Rufus King saw American slavery as an immense problem, a curse, a blight, or a national disease. If the degree of their revulsion varied, they agreed that the nation would be much safer, purer, happier, and better off without the racial slavery that they had inherited from previous generations and, some of them would emphasize, from England. Most of them also believed that America would be an infinitely better and less complicated place without the African American population, which most white leaders associated with all the defects, mistakes, sins, shortcomings, and animality of an otherwise almost perfect nation.
Lean liberty is better than fat slavery.
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.
In any country, regardless of what its laws say, wherever people act upon the idea that the disadvantage of one man is the good of another, there slavery exists. Wherever, in any country the whole people feel that the happiness of all is dependent upon the happiness of the weakest, there freedom exists.
Private property in the instruments of production is an institutional device both for dispersing power and for securing effective organization of production. The only simple property system is that of a slave society with a single slave owner — which, significantly, is the limiting case of despotism and of monopoly. Departure from such a system is a fair measure of human progress. The libertarian good society lies at an opposite extreme, in the maximum dispersion of property compatible with effective production…. Basic to liberty are property rights in labor or personal capacities. The abolitions of slavery and serfdom are the great steps toward freedom — and, by the way, are striking reconciliations of apparent conflict between productional and distributional considerations. Property in one’s own services, however, is a secure, substantial right only where there are many possible buyers. It thus implies private property in other resources and freedom of independent organizations or firms. It also implies a distinctively modern institutional achievement, namely, the separation or dissociation of the economic and the political — a political order that sustains formal rights and a largely separate economic order that gives them substance….a society based on free, responsible individuals or families must involve extensive rights of property. [ A Political Credo , pp. 27-28.]
O homines ad servitutem paratos!=--Oh, men, how ye prepare yourselves for slavery!
And what has come to prevail in democracies is the very reverse of beneficial, in those, that is, which are regarded as the most democratically run. The reason for this lies in the failure properly to define liberty. For there are two marks by which democracy is thought to be defined: “sovereignty of the majority” and “liberty.” “Just” is equated with what is equal, and the decision of the majority as to what is equal is regarded as sovereign; and liberty is seen in terms of doing what one wants. So in such a democracy each lives as he likes and for his “fancy of the moment,” as Euripides says. This is bad. It ought not to be regarded as slavery to live according to the constitution, but rather as self-preservation. [ The Politics , Book V, Chapter ix, §1310a22.]
No slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.
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).]
How do you ever manage to feed so many? You must grow crops.” “We move around so much we don’t have time to plant any crops. But we raise animals—sheep and goats and cows. So we have plenty of meat and milk. And we have manna.” “Manna?” Rahab lifted her eyebrows. “What is manna?” “It’s bread that falls from heaven.” Rahab stared at him. “I never heard of such a thing.” “I guess I’ve gotten used to the miracle,” Othniel said with a shrug. “When our God delivered us out of slavery, we were out in the desert with nothing to eat. We would have starved. But our leader Moses prayed and God sent bread from heaven. Every morning when we come out, it’s on the ground.” “You just pick up bread from the ground?” “It’s very tiny and it spoils quickly. You have to gather it every morning. I’ve been doing it all my life.
Paucos servitus, plures servitutem tenant . (“There are a few men whom slavery holds fast, but there are many more who hold fast to slavery.) [ Epistul? Morales , II, 6.
Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
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 .]
Sneezing absorbs all the faculties of the soul, as do certain bodily functions, but we do not draw therefrom the same conclusions against the greatness of man, because it is against his will. And if we make ourselves sneeze we do so against our will. It is not in view of the act itself, but for another end, and so it is not a mark of the weakness of man, and of his slavery to that act.