Simon Bolivar Quotes

No nation keeps another in subjection without herself turning into a subject nation.

One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves.

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

People can be slave-ships in shoes.

The house of Austria has publicly used every effort to deprive the country of its legitimate Independence and Constitution, designing to reduce it to a level with the other provinces long since deprived of all freedom, and to unite all in a common sink of slavery.

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

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

Our countrymen have all the folly of the ass and all the passiveness of the sheep .... They are determined not to be free.

if despotism were to be established amongst the democratic nations of our days it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild, it would degrade men without tormenting them.

The people of a nation are enslaved when, together, they are helpless to institute effective change, when the people serve the government more than the government serves them.

Pity me not. I am happier than you; for I am fighting to be free, while you are striving to enslave your countrymen.

Slavery is the rule. Freedom the exception.

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.

To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.

If ever thou be'st bound in thy scarf and beaten, thou shalt find what it is to be proud of thy bondage.

A nation that enslaves another forges its own chains.

Force works on servile natures, not the free.

However you disguise slavery, it is slavery still. Its chains, though wreathed with roses, not only fasten on the body but rivet on the mind.

Slaves would be tyrants were the chance theirs.

The greatest slave in a kingdom is generally the king of it.

No principle, that is possible to be named, can be more self-evidently false than this; or more self-evidently fatal to all political freedom. Yet it triumphed in the field, and is now assumed to be established. If it really be established, the number of slaves, instead of having been diminished by the war, has been greatly increased; for a man, thus subjected to a government that he does not want, is a slave.

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.

If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.

No people to whom liberty is given can hold it as firmly and wear it as grandly as those who wrench their liberty from the iron hand of the tyrant.

In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us.