This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
To adhere to man’s absolute freedom - one aspect of the matter - is eo ipso to condemn slavery. Yet if a man is a slave, his own will is responsible for his slavery, just as it is its will which is responsible if a people is subjugated. Hence the wrong of slavery lies at the door not simply of enslavers or conquerors but of the slaves and the conquered themselves. Slavery occurs in man’s transition from the state of nature to genuinely ethical conditions; it occurs in a world where a wrong is still right. At that stage wrong has validity and so is necessarily in place.
Absolute | Freedom | Man | Nature | People | Right | Slavery | Will | World | Wrong |
Enslave a man and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his capacity. In the constitution of human nature, the desire of bettering one’s condition is the mainspring of effort. The first touch of slavery snaps this spring.
Ambition | Capacity | Desire | Destroy | Effort | Human nature | Man | Nature | Slavery |
The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and be bought for it.
They have exiled me now from their society and I am pleased, because humanity does not exile except the one whose noble spirit rebels against despotism and oppression. He who does not prefer exile to slavery is not free by any measure of freedom, truth and duty.
Duty | Freedom | Humanity | Oppression | Slavery | Society | Spirit | Truth | Society |
Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
All temporal or human authority stems directly from spiritual and/or divine authority. But authority is the negation of freedom. God, or rather the fiction of God, is the consecration and the intellectual and moral source of all slavery on earth, and the freedom of mankind will never be complete until the disastrous and insidious fiction of a heavenly master is annihilated.
Authority | Consecration | Earth | Freedom | God | Mankind | Slavery | Will |
The origin of all wars is the pursuit of wealth, and we are forced to pursue wealth because we live in slavery to the cares of the body.
For all our penny-wisdom, for all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted that all men have sublime thoughts; that all men value the few real hours of life; they love to be heard; they love to be caught up in the vision of principles.
Habit | Life | Life | Love | Men | Principles | Slavery | Soul | Vision | Wisdom | Value |
Robert Ingersoll, fully Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll
There is no slavery but ignorance.Liberty is the child of intelligence... the object of the Freethinker is to ascertain the truth - the conditions of well-being - to the end that his life will be made of value.
Ignorance | Life | Life | Object | Slavery | Truth | Will | Child |
Adi Shankara, aka Śaṅkara Bhagavatpādācārya and Ādi Śaṅkarācārya
What is hell? To live in slavery to others. How is heaven attained? The attainment of heaven is the freedom from cravings. What is a person’s duty? To do good to all beings. What are worthless as soon as they are won? Honor and fame. What brings happiness? The friendship of the holy. What destroys craving? Realization of one’s true self. Who are our enemies? Our sense-organs, when they are uncontrolled. Who are our friends? Our sense-organs, when they are controlled. Who has overcome the world? He who has conquered his own mind.
Attainment | Duty | Fame | Freedom | Good | Heaven | Hell | Honor | Mind | Self | Sense | Slavery | World | Friendship |
Today we are not put up on the platforms and sold at the courthouse square. But we are forced to sell our strength, our time, our souls during almost every hour that we live. We have been freed from one kind of slavery only to be delivered into another.
Ahad HaAm, pen name, born Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg
There is only one object... for which we have at present the strength... and that is the moral object -the emancipation of ourselves from the inner slavery and spiritual degradation which assimilation has produced within us.
Brave and loyal followers! Long ago we resolved to serve neither the Romans nor anyone other than God Himself, who alone is the true and just Lord of mankind. The time has now come that bids us prove our determination by our deeds we have never submitted to slavery, even when it brought no danger with it. We must not choose slavery now, and with it penalties that will mean the end of everything if we fall alive into the hands of the Romans God has given us this privilege, that we can die nobly and as free men and leave this world as free men in company with our wives and children.
Danger | Deeds | Determination | God | Lord | Men | Slavery | Time | Will | World | Deeds | Danger | God |
The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.
Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment.
Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
I is a great prison. It is your slavery and bondage to the mind. The moment you enter beyond the mind, you are -- but you don't have any notion of being an ego, of being an I. In other words: the more you think you are, the less you are; the more you experience that you are not... the more you are.
Experience | Slavery | Think |
The right of conquest has no foundation other than the right of the strongest. If war does not give the conqueror the right to massacre the conquered peoples, the right to enslave them cannot be based upon a right which does not exist. No one has a right to kill an enemy except when he cannot make him a slave, and the right to enslave him cannot therefore be derived from the right to kill him. It is accordingly an unfair exchange to make him buy at the price of his liberty his life, over which the victor holds no right. Is it not clear that there is a vicious circle in founding the right of life and death on the right of slavery, and the right of slavery on the right of life and death?
Conquest | Death | Enemy | Kill | Liberty | Life | Life | Price | Right | Slavery | War |
From whatever aspect we regard the question, the right of slavery is null and void, not only as being illegitimate, but also because it is absurd and meaningless. The words slave and right contradict each other, and are mutually exclusive. It will always be equally foolish for a man to say to a man or to a people: “I make with you a convention wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; I shall keep it as long as I like, and you will keep it as long as I like.”
Absurd | Convention | Man | Regard | Right | Slavery | Will | Words |