Toussaint Louverture Quotes

It is bad to have a servant, but worse to have a master.

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

Most governments are designed for the purposes of oppression and personal ambition.

To disarm the people—that was the best and most effective way to enslave them.

The essence of squatter or popular sovereignty—I don't care how you call it—is that if one man chooses to make a slave of another, no third man shall be allowed to object.

Why independence, if the slaves of today will be the tyrants of tomorrow?

There are no tyrants where there are no slaves.

ßome would not be governed by white men, and some would not be governed by black men, and some would not be governed by mulattoes; but the truth was they did not want to be governed by anybody

Anyone who wants to see a very free world does not want government. I also don't like being extorted or being aggressed against by others.

We will have to choose not between color nor race nor religion nor between East and West either, but simply between being slaves and being free. And we will have to choose completely and for good; the time is already past now when we can choose a little of each, a little of both. We can choose a state of slavedom, and if we are powerful enough to be among the top two or three or ten, we can have a certain amount of license - until someone more powerful rises and has us machine-gunned against a cellar wall.

I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.

All socialism involves slavery.

Man is not free unless government is limited.

Deny human rights, and however little you may wish to do so, you will find yourself abjectly kneeling at the feet of that old-world god, Force.

If there is a State, then there is domination, and in turn, there is slavery.

To depend upon the Will of a Man is Slavery.

There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master.

Free men have arms; slaves do not.

He who can be, and therefore is, another's, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.

Man is born free, yet he is everywhere in chains.

The worst thing in this world, next to anarchy, is government.

A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and for government to gain ground.

When the people are sheep, the government is always a wolf.

Aggression is simply another name for government. Aggression, invasion, government, are interconvertible terms. The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control. He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it is made by one man upon another man, after the manner of the ordinary criminal, or by one man upon all other men, after the manner of an absolute monarch, or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy.