John Ruskin Quotes


Related Quotes

This is one of the major reasons that Slavery was so hard to end in the South. At the time, the dollar value of the Southern slaves was greater than the value of all the land, factories, inventory, and capital equipment of the South. Slaves were not only capital, they were the largest component of Southern capital and Southern wealth. There were numerous ideas of paying slave owners for the freedom of their slaves, and if this was done, it would have been far less expensive in money alone than the Civil War cost. However, the Southern leadership, like Fitzhugh, were totally intransient with culture and customs—indeed the Southern concept of manhood—was dependent in Slavery. The result was that no compensation was paid to slave owners and the South was impoverished as a result of its capital loss and it would not recover for 150 years.


Generally, Jefferson was not in favor of whipping slaves, but this quotation shows that he essentially accepted the basic principles of Southern Slavery—including the one that says if the person does not want to work for you, you may whip, beat, or torture him or her to produce “reasonable work.” This acceptance of slavery and profiting from it, is the terrible blot on the record of the man who otherwise was among the few greatest of Americans.


The “lords of the lash” were the Southern slave owners. The “lords of the loom” were the Northern mill owners. The Southern cotton, grown by cheap slave labor was sold to the Northern mill owners at very low prices. They in turn wove the cotton into cloth and sold it throughout the nation and to foreign countries. So, although there was strong Northern anti-slavery sentiment, the wealthy and politically powerful mill owners had a vested interest in maintaining slavery in the South.


Southern secession and the Civil War This is one of the major quotations with which historians rebut the revisionist view that the Civil War was about States’ Rights or other economic factors.


Toward the end of the 19th century Cambodia became a protectorate of France. One of the first things that the French did was abolish slavery. There was a general rebellion as few in Khmer society wanted change of any kind.


The Chinese laborers were slaves by most definitions of the word as they had been brought to South Africa on a system of indentured servitude. Slavery was illegal so the term had all kinds of political and legal significance. His statement was a masterpiece of admitting that it was almost slavery but leaving some wiggle room so as not to have classified it as such. Some use this as an example of Churchill’s capacity for hypocrisy.


Abd al-Rahman Ibn Mohammad. He is generally regarded to be the World’s first social scientist. The largest statue in Tunisia of not of a military leader of king, but of this social scientist.


This was written under the name of Ragnar Redbeard. There are a few scholars who believe that it was written by Jack London, but most credit Desmond.


John Ruskin
John Ruskin
  • Born: February 8, 1819
  • Died: January 20, 1900
  • Nationality: English
  • Profession: Writer

John Ruskin was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, as well as an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, philosopher, prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and political economy.