Mercy Otis Warren Quotes

Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.

Human freedom is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species - us.

Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.

The task for sociology is to come to the help of the individual. We have to be in service of freedom. It is something we have lost sight of.

The law of the Creator, which invests every human being with an inalienable title to freedom, cannot be repealed by any interior law which asserts that man is property.

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

When a slave leaves the jurisdiction of a state he ceases to be a slave, because he continues to be a man and leaves behind him the law which made him a slave

Man’s freedom is lacking if somebody else controls what he needs, for need may result in man’s enslavement of man..

Throughout history there have been no ideal ends which were attained with non-ideal, inhumane means, just as there has been no free society which was built by slaves. Nothing so well reveals the reality and greatness of ends as the methods used to obtain them.

Personal bondage was the prevailing form of labor in most of the world …. Freedom, not slavery, was the peculiar institution.

The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this and learn to imitate it, for man is an imitative animal.

To give liberty to, or rather, to abandon persons whose habits have been formed in slavery is like abandoning children.

We were proclaiming ourselves political hypocrites before the world by thus fostering human slavery and proclaiming ourselves, at the same time, the sole friends of human freedom.

The Catholic Church has ever been the friend of human freedom. It was Christ’s mission to set men free, and Christian people disregard his precepts and principles and example, when they seek to uphold or perpetuate involuntary human servitude.

Tell me not of rights; talk not of the property of the planter in his slaves! I deny the right--I acknowledge not the property! The principles, the feelings of our nature, rise in rebellion against it

The resources, advantages, and powers of the American people are very great, and they have, consequently, succeeded to equally great responsibilities. It seems to have devolved upon them to test whether a government, established on the principles of human freedom, can be maintained against an effort to build one upon the exclusive foundation of human bondage.

There can be no fanatics in the cause of genuine liberty.

Enslave a man and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, and his capacity.

The Church must actualize, be present in the public debate, in our struggle for a true concept of liberty and peace.

If you find your freedom, if you find something that cannot be taken from you, then you're free. If your freedom depends on what you have, or you position, or your security, or anything that is just passing, because those are just waves of things.

If we are made in some degree for others, yet in a greater are we made for ourselves. It were contrary to feeling and indeed ridiculous to suppose that a man had less rights in himself than one of his neighbors, or indeed all of them put together. This would be slavery, and not that liberty which the bill of rights has made inviolable, and for the preservation of which our government has been charged.

Every man having been born free and master of himself, no one else may under any pretext whatever subject him without his consent. To assert that the son of a slave is born a slave is to assert that he is not born a man.

If you would enjoy real freedom, you must be the slave of Philosophy.

This is true liberty, when free-born men, having to advise the public, may speak free.

We believe that the spreading out and perpetuity of the institution of slavery impairs the general welfare. We believe - nay, we know, that that is the only thing that has ever threatened the perpetuity of the Union itself.