
Pauvre et libre plutôt que riche et asservi. Bien entendu les hommes veulent être et riches et libres et c’est ce qui les conduit quelquefois à être pauvres et esclaves.
Notebooks (1942–1951)
Part of the speech to the students of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Summer 2010)
Context: Is slavery - owner, victim, profit, domination - exclusive to the human race? Have blacks, Jews, women and children been the only victims of this atrocity? Have not cows been enslaved? What about pigs, chickens, turkeys, fish, sheep? If they're not enslaved, then what are they? Free? Can slavery have a victim that is neither a human, nor an animal? Have not the oceans, the forests, the earth itself, become victims of ownership too?
Pauvre et libre plutôt que riche et asservi. Bien entendu les hommes veulent être et riches et libres et c’est ce qui les conduit quelquefois à être pauvres et esclaves.
Notebooks (1942–1951)
Source: Give Me Liberty! (1998), Ch. 7 : The New Slave Master, p. 89
“Even eternally free people are enslaved by the process of living.”
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs (2003)
“Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free.”
Source: "Ich bin ein Berliner" Speech, June 26, 1963, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ich_bin_ein_Berliner_Speech_(June_26,_1963)_John_Fitzgerald_Kennedy_trimmed.theora.ogv
Context: Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free. When all are free, then we can look forward to that day when this city will be joined as one and this country and this great Continent of Europe in a peaceful and hopeful globe. When that day finally comes, as it will, the people of West Berlin can take sober satisfaction in the fact that they were in the front lines for almost two decades.
“We believe that no nation can survive politically free but economically enslaved.”
Budget Debate, House of Commons, Ottawa, Ontario, March 22, 1943.
Source: A Letter to a Hindu (1908), V
Context: A commercial company enslaved a nation comprising two hundred millions. Tell this to a man free from superstition and he will fail to grasp what these words mean. What does it mean that thirty thousand men, not athletes but rather weak and ordinary people, have subdued two hundred million vigorous, clever, capable, and freedom-loving people? Do not the figures make it clear that it is not the English who have enslaved the Indians, but the Indians who have enslaved themselves?
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
Niemand ist mehr Sklave, als der sich für frei hält, ohne es zu sein.
Bk. II, Ch. 5; source: Die Wahlverwandtschaften, Hamburger Ausgabe, Bd. 6 (Romane und Novellen I), dtv Verlag, München, 1982, p. 397 (II.5)
Elective Affinities (1809)
“Destiny waits alike for the free man as well as for him enslaved by another's might.”
Source: Oresteia (458 BC), The Libation Bearers, line 103
The Crisis No. IV.
1770s, The American Crisis (1776–1783)