Slave Quotes - Page 25

• No social problem is as universal as the oppression of the child ... No slave was ever so much the property of his master as the child is of his parent ... Never were the rights of man ever so disregarded as in the case of the child.

  Maria Montessori

  Children, Men, Rights

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• Do not commit yourself to anybody or anything, for that is to be a slave, a slave to every man Above all, keep yourself free of commitments and obligations - they are the device of another to get you into his power

  Baltasar Gracian

  Commitment, Obligation, Devices

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• Whatever I had read as a child about the saints had thrilled me. I could see the nobility of giving one's life for the sick, the maimed, the leper. But there was another question in my mind. Why was so much done in remedying the evil instead of avoiding it in the first place? Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves, but to do away with slavery?

  Dorothy Day

  Children, Order, Evil

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• ‎In today's materialistic world there is a risk of people becoming slaves to money, as though they were simply cogs in a huge money-making machine. This does nothing for human dignity, freedom, and genuine well-being. Wealth should serve humanity, and not the other way around.

  Dalai Lama

  People, Humanity, Risk

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• He who strays from the customary becomes a sacrifice to the extraordinary; he who keeps to the customary becomes its slave. He iscondemned to perish in either case.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Sacrifice, Tradition, Cases

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• The man of genius, like a dog with a bone, or the slave who has swallowed a diamond, or a patient with the gravel, sits afar and retired, off the road, hangs out no sign of refreshment for man and beast, but says, by all possible hints and signs, I wish to be alone,--good-by,--fare-well. But the Landlord can afford to live without privacy.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Dog, Men, Solitude

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.1020, Delphi Classics

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• The soldier takes pride in saluting his Captain,
  The devotee proffers a knee to his Lord,
  Some back a mare thrown from a thoroughbred,
  Troy backed its Helen, Troy died and adored;
  Great nations blossom above,
  A slave bows down to a slave.

  William Butler Yeats

  Loyalty, Pride, Soldier

  William Butler Yeats (1997). “The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume I: The Poems, 2nd Edition”, p.581, Simon and Schuster

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• I have stopped smoking now and then, for a few months at a time, but it was not on principle, it was only to show off; it was to pulverize those critics who said I was a slave to my habits and couldn't break my bonds.

  Mark Twain

  Broken, Smoking, Months

  Mark Twain, Milton Meltzer (2002). “Mark Twain Himself: A Pictorial Biography”, p.266, University of Missouri Press

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• The Islamic community today is faced with a new version of an old struggle. My late mother used to say it doesn't matter whether you came to this country on the Mayflower or on a slave ship, through Ellis Island or the Rio Grande. We're all in the same boat now.

  Carol Moseley Braun

  Mother, Country, Struggle

  "40thCconvention of the Islamic Society of North America [John Esposito recognized as the "Abu Taleb of Islam"]". www.campus-watch.org. September 6, 2004.

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• Poverty demoralizes. A man in debt is so far a slave; and Wall-street thinks it easy for a millionaire to be a man of his word, aman of honor, but, that, in failing circumstances, no man can be relied on to keep his integrity.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Wall, Integrity, Men

  "Wealth". Book by Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860.

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• On the other side, the conservative party, composed of the most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the population, is timid, and merely defensive of property. It vindicates no right, it aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous policy, it does not build, nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the immigrant.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Art, Real, Writing

  Essays, Second Series "Politics" (1844)

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• Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action. What they have done commits and enforces them to do the same again. The first act, which was to be an experiment, becomes a sacrament.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Done, Firsts

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.749, Library of America

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• Give the slave the least elevation of religious sentiment, and he is not slave: you are the slave: he not only in his humility feels his superiority, feels that much deplored condition of his to be a fading trifle, but he makes you feel it too. He is the master.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Religious, Humility, Giving

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1866). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations”, p.258

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• By all men bond to Nothing, Being slaves without a lord, By one blind idiot world obeyed, Too blind to be abhorred.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, World, Idiot

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• Let every woman ask herself: "Why am I the slave of man? Why is my brain said not to be the equal of his brain? Why is my work notpaid equally with his? Why must my body be controlled by my husband? Why may he take my labor in the household, giving me in exchange what he deems fit? Why may he take my children from me? Will them away while yet unborn?" Let every woman ask.

  Voltairine de Cleyre

  Children, Husband, Men

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• The slave child had no thought for the morrow; but there came that blight, which too surely waits on every human being born to be a chattel.

  Harriet Ann Jacobs

  Children, Slave Girl, Waiting

  Harriet Ann Jacobs (1861). “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”, p.15

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• I was ordered to go for flowers, that my mistress's house might be decorated for an evening party. I spent the day gathering flowers and weaving them into festoons, while the dead body of my father was lying within a mile of me. What cared my owners for that? he was merely a piece of property. Moreover, they thought he had spoiled his children, by teaching them to feel that they were human beings. This was blasphemous doctrine for a slave to teach; presumptuous in him, and dangerous to the masters.

  Harriet Ann Jacobs

  Children, Lying, Father

  Harriet Ann Jacobs (2015). “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: An Autobiographical Account of an Escaped Slave and Abolitionist”, p.18, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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• Our passions may be compared to certain slaves--the more severity we show them, the better they obey us.

  Norm MacDonald

  Passion, May, Certain

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• Was the collaboration of some slaves any different than the silence of some Iranians who stood by and did nothing as Savak thugs murdered and tortured opponents of the Shah? How could we judge other men until we had stood in their shoes?

  Mohammed Reza Pahlavi

  Thug, Men, Shoes

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• The Christian religion alone contemplates the conjugal union in the order of nature; it is the only religion which presents woman to man as a companion; every other abandons her to him as a slave. To religion alone do European women owe their liberty.

  Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

  Christian, Women, Order

  Jacques Henri Bernardin de SAINT PIERRE, Henry HUNTER (D.D.) (1830*). “Studies of Nature, translated from the French, ... Carefully abridged, with a copious index, by L. T. Rede”, p.489

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• The greatest slave in a kingdom is generally the king of it.

  Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

  Kings, Kingdoms

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• Setting aside the vast herd which shows no definable character at all, it seems to me that the minority distinguished by what is commonly regarded as an excess of sin is very much more admirable than the minority distinguished by an excess of virtue. My experience of the world has taught me that the average wine-bibbler is a far better fellow than the average prohibitionist, and that the average rogue is better company than the average poor drudge, and that the worst white-slave trader of my acquaintance is a decenter man than the best vice crusader.

  H. L. Mencken

  Wine, Character, Men

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• All that the Y.M.C.A.'s horse and rings really accomplished was to fill me with an ineradicable distaste, not only for Christian endeavor in all its forms, but also for every variety of calisthenics, so that I still begrudge the trifling exertion needed to climb in and out of a bathtub, and hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense. If I had my way no man guilty of golf would be eligible to any office of trust or profit under the United States, and all female athletes would be shipped to the white-slave corrals of the Argentine.

  H. L. Mencken

  Christian, Sports, Horse

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• It was the saying of a great man, that if we could trace our descents, we should find all slaves to come from princes, and all princes from slaves; and fortune has turned all things topsy-turvy in a long series of revolutions; beside, for a man to spend his life in pursuit of a title, that serves only when he dies to furnish out an epitaph, is below a wise man's business.

  Seneca the Younger

  Wise, Men, Long

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• Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all. It sets the slave at liberty, carries the banished man home, and places all mortals on the same level, insomuch that life itself were a punishment without it.

  Seneca the Younger

  Death, Home, Men

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