Walt Whitman Quotes

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

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

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.

Slavery is the rule. Freedom the exception.

There are three ways in which a man becomes a slave. He may be born into slavery, or forced into it, or he can deliberately accept his servitude. All three forms flourish in the modern world. Men are born and forced into slavery in Russia and her satellites states. Men in the free world invite slavery when they ask the government to provide complete security, when they surrender their freedom to the "Welfare State."

All people are enslaved by something.

I'm a slave to this leaf in a diary that lists what I must do, what I must say, every half hour.

I was a king and a king's heir and now I am a slave.

Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping from them.

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

TO the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little, Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved, Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever after-ward resumes its liberty.

Hee is not free that drawes his chaine.

Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.

Every man is a prisoner, and the greatest irony of all is to be the prisoner of another man.

But there’s no such thing as free. There are only different and more horrible ways to be enslaved.

I was one of the many horses pulling the wagon and couldn't escape left or right because of the will of the driver.

It is terrible to speak of you, Liberty, for one who lives without you.

I've come out of a small jail and entered a bigger one.

See, it's no in between: you're either free or you're a slave.

I don't want to live like a prisoner.

Slavery, properly so called, is the establishment of a right which gives to one man such a power over another as renders him absolute master of his life and fortune.

No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.

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

People can be slave-ships in shoes.