The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child (1877)
Context: There is no slavery but ignorance. Liberty is the child of intelligence.
The history of man is simply the history of slavery, of injustice and brutality, together with the means by which he has, through the dead and desolate years, slowly and painfully advanced.
“Liberty without obedience is confusion, and obedience without liberty is slavery.”
William Penn (1644–1718) English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, early Quaker and founder of the Province of Pennsylvania
As quoted in Memoirs of the Private and Public Life of William Penn : Who Settled the State of Pennsylvania, and Founded the City of Philadelphia (1827) by S. C. Stevens, p. 117
“Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery”
Miles Davis (1926–1991) American jazz musician
Source: Miles: The Autobiography
Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) Russian revolutionary, philosopher, and theorist of collectivist anarchism
"Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism" http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/various/reasons-of-state.htm, presented by Bakunin as a Reasoned Proposal to the Central Committee of the League for Peace and Freedom, at the League's first congress held in Geneva (September 1867). <br class="br">Variant translation: We are convinced that freedom without Socialism is privilege and injustice, and that Socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality. <br class="br">As quoted in The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism (1953) edited by Grigoriĭ Petrovich Maksimov, p. 269
“I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.”
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Genevan philosopher
“Prejudice is the child of ignorance…”
William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer
" On Prejudice http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/Hazlitt/Prejudice.htm" <br class="br">Men and Manners: Sketches and Essays (1852)
Gerry Spence (1929) American lawyer
Source: Give Me Liberty! (1998), Ch. 14 : The Magical Weapon : Withholding Permission to Be Defeated, p. 160
Context: Teach the child to respect that which is not respectable and you teach the child the first requirement of slavery: submission to unjust authority. Children are persons. They are small persons whose perfect souls have not yet been ground through the meat grinder of slavery.
“To be ignorant of the past is to remain a child.”
Karl Popper (1902–1994) Austrian-British philosopher of science
Cicero
Misattributed
“Every tax, however, is to the person who pays it a badge, not of slavery but of liberty.”
Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist
Source: The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book V, Chapter II, Part II, p. 927.
Context: Every tax, however, is to the person who pays it a badge, not of slavery but of liberty. It denotes that he is a subject to government, indeed, but that, as he has some property, he cannot himself be the property of a master.
John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) American politician, 6th president of the United States (in office from 1825 to 1829)
Journal of John Quincy Adams (11 December 1838),
Context: The conflict between the principle of liberty and the fact of slavery is coming gradually to an issue. Slavery has now the power, and falls into convulsions at the approach of freedom. That the fall of slavery is predetermined in the counsels of Omnipotence I cannot doubt; it is a part of the great moral improvement in the condition of man, attested by all the records of history. But the conflict will be terrible, and the progress of improvement perhaps retrograde before its final progress to consummation.
