“Slavery, properly so called, is the establishment of a right which gives to one man such a power over another as renders him absolute master of his life and fortune.”

Vanity and pride of nations; vanity is as advantageous to a government as pride is dangerous.

It is always the adventurous who accomplish great things.

It is always the adventurers who do great things, not the sovereigns of great empires.

We ought to be very cautious and circumspect in the prosecution of magic and heresy. The attempt to put down these two crimes may be extremely perilous to liberty.

Not to be loved is a misfortune, but it is an insult to be loved no longer.

Christianity stamped its character on jurisprudence; for empire has ever a connection with the priesthood.

An empire founded by war has to maintain itself by war.

Thus the creation, which seems an arbitrary act, supposes laws as invariable as those of the fatality of the Atheists. It would be absurd to say that the Creator might govern the world without those rules, since without them it could not subsist.

Passion makes us feel, but never see clearly.

The state of slavery is in its own nature bad.

Do you think that God will punish them for not practicing a religion which he did not reveal to them?

To love to read is to exchange hours of ennui for hours of delight.

When one wants to change manners and customs, one should not do so by changing the laws.

We receive three educations, one from our parents, one from our school-masters, and one from the world. The third contradicts all that the first two teach us.

Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations derived from the nature of things.

When a government is arrived to that degree of corruption as to be incapable of reforming itself, it would not lose much by being new moulded.

He finds his fellow guilty of a skin Not color’d like his own, and having pow’r T’ enforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey.

The state of slavery is in its own nature bad.

Capitalism is but the gentlemen’s method of slavery.

To free him from the tyrannies, petty or otherwise, which served to make his existence a slavery.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.

I pity them greatly, but I must be mum, for how could we do without sugar and rum?

Socialism means slavery.

The fact is, riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, nor worse, for a people than another.