W. H. Auden Quotes

Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them.

There is no freedom in peaceful slavery.

He wants to enslave you.' 'I shudder at the thought of being free.

A slave has not the freedom even to do the right thing.

This is the difference between slavery and freedom. The slave must do what his superior orders him to do, but the free citizen-and this is what freedom means-is in a position to choose his own way of life.

A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.

The world today is divided into the free and the enslaved.

Once a person insists on how you are to think he immediately begins to insist on how you are to behave.

Slavery is the rule. Freedom the exception.

War is horrible, but slavery is worse.

I pity from the bottom of my heart any nation or body of people that is so unfortunate as to get entangled in the net of slavery.

Beat and cuff your slave, keep him hungry and spiritless, and he will follow the chain of his master like a dog. Feed and clothe him well, work him moderately, surround him with physical comfort and dreams of freedom intrude.

There are a few men whom slavery holds fast, but there are many more who hold fast to slavery.

In part because they had no choice, right? If you were a slave, you did what the master said. And they said to worship: "You're going to worship with us."

This is what it means to be a slave; to be abused and bear it; compelled by violence to suffer wrong.

Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.

It's sort of what the Johnny and Devi stories are about, the idea of always being a slave to something.

Slavery takes hold of few, but many take hold of slavery.

He loves his bonds who, when the first are broke, Submits his neck into a second yoke.

Why hast thou made me born in this country, The inhabitant of which is satisfied with being a slave?

The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.

To some extent I liken slavery to death.

The enslaving of the other is also the enslaving of the self.

Slavery and freedom cannot exist together.

Man is everywhere still in chains.