Lysander Spooner Quotes

With the laborers of England generally, does not the moral coercion of want subject their will as despotically to that of their employer, as the physical constraint does the soldier, the seaman, or the slave?

“I make you free,” so speak the Rights of Man to the laborer, “free to earn a wretched living and turn your employer into a millionaire; free to sell him your liberty for a mouthful of bread. He will imprison you ten hours or twelve hours in his workshops; he will not let you go till you are wearied to the marrow of your bones, till you have just enough strength left to gulp down pour soup and sink into a heavy sleep. You have but one of your rights that you may not sell, and that is the right to pay taxes.

The wealthy have never liked to pay for the labor that enriches them. Ever since slavery was eliminated, they have been trying to keep it as close to slavery as they can without violating the slave laws.

The unproductive tillage of human cattle takes that which of right belongs to free labor, and which is necessary for the support and happiness of our own race.

We have only dented the fortress and the wage slaves are still locked in their cells.

With the coming of peace, the workers are no longer needed as soldiers; they are no longer comrades, defenders of the fatherland, heroes. Once more they become beasts of burden, objects of exploitation.

There are no limits to which powers of privilege will not go to keep the workers in slavery.

In the society of to-day the means of production are a monopoly of the capitalistic class; the dependence of the working classes which results from this is the cause of misery and of servitude in all its forms.

... the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.

As long as the working-people fold hands and pray the gods in Washington to give them work, so long they will not get it. So long as they tramp the streets, whose stones they lay, whose filth they clean, whose sewers they dig, yet upon which they must not stand too long lest the policeman bid them "move on"; as long as they go from factory to factory, begging for the opportunity to be a slave, receiving the insults of bosses and foremen, getting the old "no," the old shake of the head, in these factories they built, whose machines they wrought; so long as they consent to herd like cattle, in the cities, driven year after year, more and more, off the mortgaged land, the land they cleared, fertilized, cultivated, rendered of value; so long as they stand shivering, gazing thro' plate glass windows at overcoats, which they made, but cannot buy, starving in the midst of food they produced but cannot have; so long as they continue to do these things vaguely relying upon some power outside themselves, be it god, or priest, or politician, or employer, or charitable society, to remedy matters, so long deliverance will be delayed.

I learned in the early part of my career that labor must bear the cross for others' sins, must be the vicarious sufferer for the wrongs that others do.

The workingmen have been exploited all the way up and down the line by employers, landlords, everybody.

Freedom" is a grand word, but under the banner of Free Trade the most predatory wars were conducted; under the banner of "free labor" the toilers were robbed.

Capitalists … can grow rich only where there is an oppressed body of labourers

We believe this is a most ill-judged and suicidal act ... from which we should emerge only through blood and fire or chains and slavery more dire than any we have yet known. There are men earning 15/-, 20/-, 25/- and 30/- a week. I ask, will those men be likely, in a body, to keep the Sacred Holiday? I say not; and, if not, who will be sacrificed? The answer is easy. The most determined, resolute and oppressed.

The idea that you have to rent yourself to somebody and follow their orders, and that they own and you work there, and you built it but you don't own it, that's a highly unnatural notion. You don't have to study any complicated theories to see that this is an attack on human dignity.

There is grim irony in speaking of the freedom of contract of those who, because of their economic necessities, give their service for less than is needful to keep body and soul together.

Today the insatiable quest for profit promotes the new slavery. In bewildering ways, the new is more pernicious than the old, for the New American Slave is told he is free, and he clings to that myth as if his life depended upon it

We have stricken the shackles from 4,000,000 human beings and brought all laborers to a common level, but not so much by the elevation of former slaves as by reducing the whole working population, white and black, to a condition of serfdom. While boasting of our noble deeds, we are careful to conceal the ugly fact that by our iniquitous money system we have manipulated a system of oppression which, though more refined, is no less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery.

In some countries the laboring poor were called freemen and in others they were called slaves but that the difference of the state was imaginary only…. the condition of the laboring poor in most countries, that of the fishermen particularly in the Northern states, is as abject as that of slaves.

The “natural laws of economics” are in fact tools in the hands of the avaricious and the greedy for keeping down and oppressing the laboring classes.

You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

The exploitation of distressed workers and the social disparities must not continue.

If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor.

As it becomes more and more difficult to get land, so will the virtual enslavement of the laboring-classe s go on. As the value of land rises, more and more of the earnings of labor will be demanded for the use of land, until finally nothing is left to laborers but the wages of slavery -- a bare living.