Slave Quotes - Page 18

• I have discovered that a famed familiarity in great ones is a note of certain usurpation on the less; for great and popular men feign themselves to be servants to others to make those slaves to them.

  Ben Jonson

  Men, Popularity, Certain

  Ben Jonson, William Gifford (1857). “The Works of Ben Jonson”, p.875

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• As it is the nature of a kite to devour little birds, so it is the nature of some minds to insult and tyrannize over little people; this being the means which they use to recompense themselves for their extreme servility and condescension to their superiors; for nothing can be more reasonable than that slaves and flatterers should exact the same taxes on all below them which they themselves pay to all above them.

  Henry Fielding

  Mean, People, Bird

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• Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves.

  John Milton

  Mills, Gaza, Asks

  Samson Agonistes l. 40 (1671)

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• Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Revenge, Reality, Fiction

  Simone de Beauvoir (2016). “Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter”, p.34, HarperCollins

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• The first class of readers may be compared to an hour-glass, their reading being as the sand; it runs in and runs out, and leaves not a vestige behind. A second class resembles a sponge, which imbibes everything, and returns it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtier. A third class is like a jelly-bag, which allows all that is pure to pass away, and retains only the refuse and dregs. The fourth class may be compared to the slave of Golconda, who, casting aside all that is worthless, preserves only the pure gems.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Running, Reading, Class

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• He who fears to venture as far as his heart urges and his reason permits, is a coward; he who ventures further than he intended to go, is a slave.

  Heinrich Heine

  Heart, Coward, Venture

  Heinrich Heine (1888). “Wit, Wisdom, and Pathos”

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• Money is both the generation and corruption of purchased honor; honor is both the child and slave of potent money: the credit which honor hath lost, money hath found. When honor grew mercenary, money grew honorable. The way to be truly noble is to contemn both.

  Francis Quarles

  Money, Children, Honor

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• The Confucian concept and Chinese ideograms for 'woman' and for 'slave' are the same.

  Robin Morgan

  Women, Chinese, Confucian

  Robin Morgan (2014). “The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism”, p.81, Open Road Media

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• Men who marry wives very much superior to themselves are not so truly husbands to their wives as they are unawares made slaves to their position.

  Plutarch

  Husband, Men, Wife

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• Tremble not before the free man, but before the slave who has chains to break.

  Margaret Fuller

  Men, Break, Chains

  Margaret Fuller (2012). “Woman in the Nineteenth Century”, p.44, Courier Corporation

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• Who are we? And for what are we going to fight? Are we the titled slaves of George the Third? The military conscripts of Napoleon the Great? Or the frozen peasants of the Russian Czar? No -- we are the free born sons of America; the citizens of the only republic now existing in the world; and the only people on earth who possess rights, liberties, and property which they dare call their own.

  Andrew Jackson

  Military, Fighting, Son

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• Men must be either the slaves of duty, or the slaves of force.

  Joseph Joubert

  Men, Force, Duty

  Joseph Joubert (1867). “Some of the "Thoughts" of Joseph Joubert”, p.90

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• Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience; but, as blind obedience is ever sought for by power, tyrants and sensualists are in the right when they endeavor to keep women in the dark because, the former only want slaves, and the latter a play-thing.

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Dark, Play, Tyrants

  1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, pt.1, ch.2.

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• power is not a thing to be owned. But if you believe that it is such a thing, losing it becomes a possibility to fear. That fear, I think, is one reason for the dark projections of a catastrophic future that are so widespread, in our dual society. The present powerful, being committed to polarization, expect that any new deal will overturn the one that set them in authority; that the last shall be first and the first last, role reversal everywhere, men as slaves, women as masters, in a revolution of contradiction.

  Elizabeth Janeway

  Change, Powerful, Fear

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• Say, ye oppress'd by some fantastic woes,
  Some jarring nerve that baffles your repose;
  Who press the downy couch, while slaves advance
  With timid eye, to read the distant glance;
  Who with sad prayers the weary doctor tease,
  To name the nameless ever-new disease;
  Who with mock patience dire complaints endure,
  Which real pain and that alone can cure;
  How would ye bear in real pain to lie,
  Despised, neglected, left alone to die?
  How would ye bear to draw your latest breath,
  Where all that's wretched paves the way for death?

  George Crabbe

  Prayer, Pain, Real

  George Crabbe, Reginald Heber, Robert Pollok (1857). “The Poetical Works of Crabbe, Heber, and Pollok: Complete in One Volume”, p.15

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• To-day Massachusetts; and the whole of the American republic, from the border of Maine to the Pacific slopes, and from the Lakes to the Gulf, stand upon the immutable and everlasting principles of equal and exact justice. The days of unrequited labor are numbered with the past. Fugitive slave laws are only remembered as relics of that barbarism which John Wesley pronounced "the sum of all villainies," and whose knowledge of its blighting effects was matured by his travels in Georgia and the Carolinas.

  Horace Mann

  Past, Lakes, Law

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• Slavery's crime against humanity did not begin when one people defeated and enslaved its enemies (though of course this was bad enough), but when slavery became an institution in which some men were 'born' free and others slave, when it was forgotten that it was man who had deprived his fellow-men of freedom, and when the sanction for the crime was attributed to nature.

  Hannah Arendt

  Men, People, Humanity

  Hannah Arendt (1968). “Imperialism: Part Two Of The Origins Of Totalitarianism”, p.189, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Many of us are slaves to our minds. Our own mind is our worst enemy. We try to focus, and our mind wanders off. We try to keep stress at bay, but anxiety keeps us awake at night. We try to be good to the people we love, but then we forget them and put ourselves first.

  Sakyong Mipham

  Love, Stress, Night

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• Wages? You want to be wage slaves? Answer me that! Of course not. What is it that makes wage slaves? Wages! I want you to be free. Strike off your chains! Strike up the band! Strike three you're out! Remember, there's nothing like Liberty, except Colliers and The Saturday Evening Post. Be free, now and forever. One and individual. One for all and all for me, and tea for two and six for a quarter.

  Groucho Marx

  Wisdom, Two, Forever

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• I can't be a slave to the machine, you feel like you're in the matrix.

  Kanye West

  Machines, Like You, Feels

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• It's always intrigued me that amidst the group called slaves there were individuals who were extremely able, who were extremely colorful, who were powerful personalities, who by no means fit the usual images of slaves. They were people who, through their personalities and abilities, were very respected in the community where they lived by both black and white.

  Alex Haley

  Powerful, Mean, Black And White

  Source: bookpage.com

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• There was a great deal of inbreeding between the Indians and the slaves. Genetically speaking, black people are some part black, some part European.

  Alex Haley

  People, Black, Inbreeding

  Source: bookpage.com

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• To the Memory of those faithful brown slave-men of the plantations throughout the South, Daddy's contemporaries all, who during the war while their masters were away fighting in a cause opposed to their emancipation, brought their blankets and slept outside their mistresses' doors, thus keeping night-watch over otherwise unprotected women and children -- a faithful guardianship of which the annals of those troublous times record no instance of betrayal.

  Ruth Stout

  Children, Memories, Betrayal

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• The slave power dares anything, and it can be conquered only by the united masses of the people. From Congress to the people, I appeal.

  Charles Sumner

  People, Slavery, Congress

  Nassau William Senior, Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe, Charles Sumner (1856). “American slavery: repr. of an article [by N.W. Senior, entitled Slavery in the United States] on 'Uncle Tom's cabin' [by H.E.B. Stowe] and of mr. Sumner's speech of the 19th and 20th of May, 1856. With a notice of the events which followed that speech”, p.143

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• It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation. Yes we can. It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights. Yes we can. It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness. Yes we can.

  Barack Obama

  Night, Destiny, Yes We Can

  Barack Obama, (2008). “Change We Can Believe In”, p.222, Canongate Books

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