Richard John Neuhaus Quotes

Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.

Men aspiring to be free can hardly think of enslaving others.

I have observed this in my experience of slavery, - that whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain my freedom. I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceased to be a man.

The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and to his fellow-men.

While I have often said that all men out to be free, yet I would allow those colored persons to be slaves who want to be; and next to them those white persons who argue in favor of making other people slaves. I am in favor of giving an opportunity to such white men to try it on for themselves.

Forbid a man to think for himself or to act for himself and you may add the joy of piracy and the zest of smuggling to his life.

Where all your rights become only an accumulated wrong; where men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land, to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to garner the fruits of their own labours...then surely it is a braver, a saner and a truer thing, to be a rebel in act and deed against such circumstances as these than tamely to accept it as the natural lot of men.

I have always thought that all men should be free; but if any should be slaves, it should be first those who desire for themselves, and secondly those who desire it for others. Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

Humanists recognize that it is only when people feel free to think for themselves, using reason as their guide, that they are best capable of developing values that succeed in satisfying human needs and serving human interests.

Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.

When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.

Either be wholly slaves or wholly free.

Death is better than slavery.

I'm not interested in being commodified. I'm not into being sold. I'm not a slave.

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

To become self-aware, people must be allowed to hear a plurality of opinions and then make up their own minds. They must be allowed to say, write and publish whatever they want. Freedom of expression is the most basic, but fundamental, right. Without it, human beings are reduced to automatons.

I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.

No man may make another free.

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

He who dares not reason, is a slave.

If we are not represented, we are slaves.

One person may need (or want) more leisure, another more work; one more adventure, another more security, and so on. It is this diversity that makes a country, indeed a state, a city, a church, or a family, healthy. 'One-size-fits-all,' and that size determined by the State has a name, and that name is 'slavery.'

Let people have an education and you can't stop them.

I would prefer to be a citizen of an independent country rather than Emperor of an enslaved one.

Liberation is not deliverance.