Aristotle Quotes About Slaves

• The worst thing about slavery is that the slaves eventually get to like it.

  Aristotle

  Slavery, Slave, Worst

• Those who cannot bravely face danger are the slaves of their attackers.

  Aristotle

  Veterans Day, Military, American Veterans

• A proper wife should be as obedient as a slave... The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities - a natural defectiveness.

  Aristotle

  Wife, Quality, Female

• 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

  Differences, Errors, Government

  Aristotle (2012). “Politics”, p.263, Courier Corporation

• There is only one condition in which we can imagine managers not needing subordinates, and masters not needing slaves. This condition would be that each (inanimate) instrument could do its own work.

  Aristotle

  Would Be, Imagine, Slave

  Aristotle (1963). “The Politics of Aristotle”

• If every tool, when ordered, or even of its own accord, could do the work that befits it... then there would be no need either of apprentices for the master workers or of slaves for the lords.

  Aristotle

  Tools, Would Be, Needs

• When the looms spin by themselves, we'll have no need for slaves.

  Aristotle

  Needs, Slave

• He who is by nature not his own but another's man is by nature a slave.

  Aristotle

  Men, Class, Slave

  Aristotle, Stephen Everson (1996). “Aristotle: The Politics and the Constitution of Athens”, p.16, Cambridge University Press

• Nor was civil society founded merely to preserve the lives of its members; but that they might live well: for otherwise a state might be composed of slaves, or the animal creation... nor is it an alliance mutually to defend each other from injuries, or for a commercial intercourse. But whosoever endeavors to establish wholesome laws in a state, attends to the virtues and vices of each individual who composes it; from whence it is evident, that the first care of him who would found a city, truly deserving that name, and not nominally so, must be to have his citizens virtuous.

  Aristotle

  Animal, Law, Cities

• Tools may be animate as well as inanimate; for instance, a ship's captain uses a lifeless rudder, but a living man for watch; for a servant is, from the point of view of his craft, categorized as one of its tools. So any piece of property can be regarded as a tool enabling a man to live, and his property is an assemblage of such tools; a slave is a sort of living piece of property; and like any other servant is a tool in charge of other tools.

  Aristotle

  Men, Views, Watches

• For suppose that every tool we had could perform its task, either at our bidding or itself perceiving the need, and if-like the statues made by Dædalus or the tripods of Hephæstus, of which the poet says that "self-moved they enter the assembly of the gods" - shuttles in a loom could fly to and fro and a plectrum play a lyre all self-moved, then master-craftsmen would have no need of servants nor masters of slaves.

  Aristotle

  Self, Play, Bidding

• Neither should men study war with a view to the enslavement of those who do not deserve to be enslaved; but first of all they should provide against their own enslavement, and in the second place obtain empire for the good of the governed, and not for the sake of exercising a general despotism, and in the third place they should seek to be masters only over those who deserve to be slaves.

  Aristotle

  War, Exercise, Men

  Aristotle (2013). “The Essential Aristotle”, p.383, Simon and Schuster

• He who can be, and therefore is, another's, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.

  Aristotle

  Slave, Reason, Enough

  Aristotle (2008). “Politics”, p.34, Cosimo, Inc.

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