1770s, African Slavery in America (March 1775)
“When the Indians complain that the English have enslaved them it is as if drunkards complained that the spirit-dealers who have settled among them have enslaved them. You tell them that they might give up drinking, but they reply that they are so accustomed to it that they cannot abstain, and that they must have alcohol to keep up their energy. Is it not the same thing with the millions of people who submit to thousands or even to hundreds, of others — of their own or other nations? If the people of India are enslaved by violence it is only because they themselves live and have lived by violence, and do not recognize the eternal law of love inherent in humanity.”
Source: A Letter to a Hindu (1908), V
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Leo Tolstoy 456
Russian writer 1828–1910Related quotes
Source: What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
Written by Henry Stuber as part of a biographical sketch of Franklin appended to a 1793 edition of Franklin's autobiography and sometimes reprinted with it in the 19th century. It is frequently misattributed to Franklin himself.
Misattributed
Context: Libraries … will be the best security for maintaining our liberties. A nation of well-informed men, who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them, cannot be enslaved. It is in the regions of ignorance that tyranny reigns.
“When it's for each other that people give things up they don't miss them.”
Book VI, ch. III
The Ambassadors (1903)
Quoted in [Datta Bandegiri,Asavari Fadanis & Aparna Atre, Paper solution English Reader(L.L.) Std.X, http://books.google.com/books?id=iBg8W5l2DlUC&pg=PA87, Jeevandeep Prakashan Pvt Ltd, 87–, GGKEY:C8230HKTBTZ, 87]
As quoted in The Defiant Imagination : Why Culture Matters (2004) by Max Wyman, p. 85