Andre Breton Quotes

It is just as difficult and dangerous to try to free a people that wants to remain servile as it is to enslave a people that wants to remain free.

The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.

Corrupted freemen are the worst of slaves.

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

The States in which we dwell have twice availed themselves of our voluntary services, and have repaid us with chains and slavery. Shall we a third time kiss the foot that crushes us? If so, we deserve our chains.

You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power — he’s free again.

There are no tyrants where there are no slaves.

As long as the superstition that people should obey unjust laws exists, so long will slavery exist

A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years. Neither are a people any the less slaves because permitted periodically to choose new masters.

A lot of people died fighting tyranny. The least I can do is vote against it.

The cry of the Have-Nots has never been "give us our hearts," but always "get off our backs"; they ask not for love but for breathing space.

The master who fears the choices his people will make enough to take those choices away isn't worth serving.

The question is whether you can bear freedom. At present the vast majority of men, whether white or black, require the discipline of labor which enslaves them for their own good.

A well-paid slave is nonetheless a slave.

To toil for a hard master is bitter, but to have no master to toil for is more bitter still.

If you see anybody wail and complain, call him a slave, though he be clad in purple.

Not by the forces of civil war can you govern the very weakest woman. You can kill that woman, but she escapes you then; you cannot govern her. No power on earth can govern a human being, however feeble, who withholds his or her consent.

Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.

When liberty returns, I will return.

Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master.

People demand freedom only when they have no power.

The language marches in step with the executioners. Therefore we must get a new language.

A man can submit today in order to resist tomorrow. My submission had been such. And because I had not been free to show my real feeling, to voice my true thoughts, my submission had bred bitterness and anger. And there were nearly ten million others who had submitted with equal anger and bitterness.

This is just what I have thought when I have seen slaves at work - they seem to go through the motions of labor without putting strength into them. They keep their powers in reserve for their own use at night, perhaps.

Some people are by nature slaves and will always be so.