Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal - that there is no human relation between master and slave. — Leo Tolstoy
Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to economic poverty — Amartya Sen
Financial struggle is often the direct result of people working all their lives for someone else. — Robert Kiyosaki
The lowest stage of humanity is experienced when the individual must labour for a small pittance of wages from others. — Robert Owen
No one is truly free, they are a slave to wealth, fortune, the law, or other people restraining them from acting according to their will. — Euripides
The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender. — Bible Proverbs
No man on earth is truly free, All are slaves of money or necessity. Public opinion or fear of prosecution forces each one, against his conscience, to conform. — Euripides
Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt. — Ezra Pound
The people of a nation are enslaved when, together, they are helpless to institute effective change, when the people serve the government more than the government serves them. — Gerry Spence
Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor. — Norbert Wiener
Real freedom must include economic security. — Bernie Sanders
Short Economic Slavery Quotes
A man is no less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years. — Lysander Spooner
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. — Euripides
Under the freest constitution ignorant people are still slaves. — Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet
All socialism involves slavery. — Herbert Spencer
People can be slave-ships in shoes. — Zora Neale Hurston
Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment. — Huey Newton
Better to be a poor woman than the slave of the rich. — Swedish Proverbs
He who is not capable of enduring poverty is not capable of being free. — Victor Hugo
Economic Slavery Image Quotes
I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.
Modern Slavery Quotes
You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know. — William Wilberforce
Nothing happens just because we are aware of modern day slavery, but nothing will ever happen until we are. — Sayings
Not since the days of slavery have there been so many people who feel entitled to what other people have produced as there are in the modern welfare state, whether in Western Europe or on this side of the Atlantic. — Thomas Sowell
We're all consumers. The consumer is not a moron; she is your wife.
The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight-of-hand that was ever invented. — Josiah Stamp
What if every church in America had a ministry to stand against modern slavery? — Dillon Burroughs
Modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history of slavery, genocide, violence and exploitation every bit as abhorrent as Mao's China or Stalin's Soviet Union. — Terry Eagleton
Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.
People-trafficking is modern day slavery. There are more slaves today than there were at the height of the slave trade. — Ross Kemp
I am confident that we will one day end the scourge of modern slavery, because I believe in those committed to this issue. — Barack Obama
Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery. — Bertrand Russell
Slavery Quotes
I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery. — Thomas Jefferson
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds! — Marcus Garvey
Wealth breeds a class of people for whom human beings are disposable commodities. Once oligarchs achieve unchecked economic and political power, as they have in the United States, the citizens too become disposable.
Capitalism is a development by refinement from feudalism, just as feudalism is development by refinement from slavery . Capitalism is but the gentlemen's method of slavery. — Kwame Nkrumah
My mission is to lead the country out of a bad situation of corruption, depression and slavery. After I rid the country of these vices, I will then organize and supervise a general election of a genuinely democratic civilian government. — Idi Amin
The man who is not able to develop and use his mind is bound to be the slave of the other man who uses his mind — Marcus Garvey
America's greatest crime against the black man was not slavery or lynching, but that he was taught to wear a mask of self-hate and self-doubt. — Malcolm X
The greatest evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude but rather the narrative of racial differences we created to legitimate slavery. Because we never dealt with that evil, I don't think slavery ended in 1865, it just evolved. — Bryan Stevenson
What a bunch of garbage, liberal, Democratic, conservative, Republican, it's all there to control you, two sides of the same coin! Two management teams, bidding for control of the CEO job of Slavery Incorporated! — Alex Jones
If you are not the victim, don't examine it entirely from your point of view because when YOU'RE not the victim, it becomes pretty easy to rationalize and excuse cruelty, injustice, inequality, slavery, and even murder. But when you're the victim, things look a lot differently from that angle. — Gary Yourofsky
Wage Slaves Quotes
In antiquity slaves were, in all honesty called slaves. In the middle ages, they took the name of serfs. Nowadays they are called wage earners. — Mikhail Bakunin
A man working for wages his whole life is not really free. That is why Jefferson said, you have to own land. Southerners said, - and they weren't being hypocritical - they said slavery is the foundation of freedom because if you own slaves, you are freer yourself. — Eric Foner
They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. — Charles Bukowski
Like all wage slaves, he had two crosses to bear: the people he worked for and the people he worked with — Stephen Vizinczey
Hundreds of thousands and millions of wage slaves of capital and peasants downtrodden by the serf-owners are going to the slaughter for the dynastic interests of a handful of crowned brigands, for the profits of the bourgeoisie in its drive to plunder foreign lands. — Vladimir Lenin
Most of the slaves, who were thus unconditionally freed, returned without any solicitation to their former masters, to serve them, at stated wages; as free men. The work, which they now did, was found to better done than before. — Thomas Clarkson
Besides paid white laborers, there was everywhere a class of white servants bound without wages for a term of years, and a more miserable class of Negro slaves. — Albert Bushnell Hart
Wages is a cunning device of the devil, for the benefit of tender consciences, who would retain all the advantages of the slave system, without the expense, trouble, and odium of being slave-holders. — Orestes Brownson
If there must always be a laboring population distinct from proprietors and employers, we regard the slave system as decidedly preferable to the system at wages. — Orestes Brownson
Slavery Freedom Quotes
Patterning your life around other's opinions is nothing more than slavery. — Lawana Blackwell
Whenever legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience. — John Locke
Freedom from slavery is achieved only when a person starts to feel and understand that he would prefer death to life as a slave. — Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale
Of the people, by the people, for the people. — Sun Yat-sen
Every artist, every scientist, every writer must decide now where he stands. The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative. — Paul Robeson
Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. — Bob Marley
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. — George Orwell
I love the smell of Waffle House; it's the smell of freedom, being on the open road and knowing that ninety percent of the people eating around you are also on that road. Truck driver's, road-trippers, hangovers--those who don't live that monotonous life of society slavery. — J.A. Redmerski
Slave power crushes freedom of speech and of opinion. Slave power degrades labor. Slave power is arrogant, is jealous and intrusive, is cruel, is despotic, not only over the slave but over the community, the state. — Elizabeth Van Lew
I know that there are no limits to which the powers of privilege will not go to keep the workers in slavery — Mother Jones
History has a long-range perspective. It ultimately passes stern judgment on tyrants and vindicates those who fought, suffered, were imprisoned, and died for human freedom, against political oppression and economic slavery. — Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
Man's inhumanity to man is not the last word. The truth lies deeper. It is economic slavery, the savage struggle for a crumb, that has converted mankind into wolves and sheep. — Alexander Berkman
The present age handed over the workers, each alone and defenseless, to the unbridled greed of competitors... so that a very few and exceedingly rich men have laid a yoke of almost slavery on the unnumbered masses of non-owning workers. — Pope Leo XIII
Slavery is what slavery's always been: About one person controlling another person using violence and then exploiting them economically, paying them nothing. That's what slavery's about — Kevin Bales
The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. — Thomas Jefferson
The breakdown of the black community, in order to maintain slavery, began with the breakdown of the black family. Men and women were not legally allowed to get married because you couldn't have that kind of love. It might get in the way of the economics of slavery. Your children could be taken from you and literally sold down the river. — Kerry Washington
Racism is a way to gain economic advantage at the expense of others. Slavery and plantations may be gone, but racism still allows us to regard those who may keep us from financial gain as less than equals. — Alveda King
The truth is that the whole life of the worker is simply a continuous and dismaying succession of terms of serfdom - voluntary from the juridical point of view but compulsory in the economic sense - broken up by momentarily brief interludes of freedom accompanied by starvation; in other words, it is real slavery. — Mikhail Bakunin
[...] it is generally accepted that the Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery. That, at best, is a half-truth. Slavery was an issue, but the primary force for war was a clash between the economic interests of the North and the South. Even the issue of slavery itself was based on economics. — G. Edward Griffin
As for me, I am deeply a democrat; this is why I am in no way a socialist. Democracy and socialism cannot go together. You can't have it both ways. Socialism is a new form of slavery. — Alexis de Tocqueville
Our opinions agree as to the evil, moral, political, and economical, of slavery. — James Madison
The experience of the past lives little doubt that every economic system must sooner or later rely upon some form of the profit motive to stir individuals and groups to productivity. Substitutes like slavery, police supervision, or ideological enthusiasm prove too unproductive, too expensive, or too transient. — Will Durant
I don't find the idea of sewing degrading. A thing is degrading when you are forced to do it, through economic reasons or through slavery or some other form of compulsion. — Margaret Atwood
What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion. — Ayn Rand
Each man has an equal social right to multiply his power of motion by all the social factors of civilization. Private property in any of these factors is inconsistent with this fundamental right; it must, obviously, prove a source of economic despotism and industrial slavery. — Daniel De Leon
Slavery as an institution that degraded man to a thing has never died out. In some periods of history it has flourished: many civilizations have climbed to power and glory on the backs of slaves. In other times slaves have dwindled in number and economic importance. But never has slavery disappeared. — Milton Meltzer
Does man's freedom consist in revolting against all laws? We say no, in so far as laws are natural, economic, and social laws, not authoritatively imposed but inherent in things, in relations, in situations, the natural development of which is expressed by those laws. We say YES if they are political and juridical laws, imposed upon men by men. — Mikhail Bakunin
Formerly when a man worked ten hours a day, it was called economic slavery; nowadays it is called moonlighting. — Evan Esar
The Civil War was started over economic issues, not slavery. The War was not popular in the North until the issue of slavery was added at a later time to turn it into a moral crusade. — G. Edward Griffin
The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states. — Charles Dickens
We in Africa are always on the receiving end. We have had human slavery, political slavery, economic slavery and now religious slavery. We in the church are saying no. We are prepared to live by what God says, not what you say. Man shall not sleep with man, woman shall not sleep with woman. — Peter Akinola
I think all Americans need to recognize that, as tragic and horrible as slavery was, as big an economic shadow as it cast, the one thing it didn't do was strip people of their humanity. And I wish that all of us were as strong as the people that walked down those steps and got on those boats. — Lonnie Bunch
We forget the conditions - not only in slavery - but after slavery, when there was this purposeful locking out of African Americans from economic opportunity. Or we forget today's incarceration rates, and educational and housing discrimination; all of these things. We pretend that everything that has happened happened long ago, and then we act as if we all now just treat each other equally, everything will be fine. — Ben H. Winters
There are millions of white Americans today who still can barely bring themselves to acknowledge that the Civil War, with its twin Americas locked in a death match, was about slavery. They'll argue it was about economics, and they're right only because one of those economies was a slave economy. They'll argue it was about culture, and they're right only because one of those cultures was a slave culture. — Steve Erickson
Ending the slave trade was contrary to British economic interests. For all its limitations and hypocrisies - British slavery itself, of course, still continued to exist - I still think it was a great moment in human history. — Henry Louis Gates
The idea that the West was economically successful because of slavery, it's just nonsense. — Ibn Warraq
Slavery had very little to do with the economic success of the West. Just look at the facts and figures and how much slavery actually contributed to development. — Ibn Warraq
Racism is an effect of slavery, not the other way around. Once slavery was abolished, not only did racism not disappear, neither did the economic system it upheld. — Sarah Churchwell
The South was at the point where the scale was tipping against slavery. It was slowly dawning on the plantation owners that slave labor was not economic, besides being morally wrong. Slavery was destined to be abolished, whether for economic reasons or moral reasons matters not, but the international intriguers were not going to wait for voluntary abolition to rob them of their trump card. — John Coleman
Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the "right" to education, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for human cattle. — P. J. O'Rourke
What we forget is that African Americans made the largest contribution to America, economically, before the Civil War of any sector of society. I read that the railroads were worth about $2 billion, but slavery was a $3 billion asset. — Andrew Young
There is in fact a manly and legitimate passion for equality that spurs all men to wish to be strong and esteemed. This passion tends to elevate the lesser to the rank of the greater. But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom. — Alexis de Tocqueville
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