Gerry Spence Quotes

The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this and learn to imitate it, for man is an imitative animal.

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

We have been told that…Britain is the mother and we are the children, that a filial duty and submission is due from us to her and that we ought to doubt our own judgment and presume that she is right, even when she seems to us to shake the foundations of government. But admitting we are children, have not children a right to complain when their parents are attempting to break their limbs, to administer poison, or to sell them to enemies for slaves?

Children are human beings to whom respect is due, superior to us by reason of their innocence and of the greater possibilities of their future.

In fact, a child is not even considered a human being.

Children live in occupied territory. The brave and the foolhardy openly rebel against authority, whether harsh or benign. But most tread warily, outwardly accommodating themselves to alien mores and edicts while living in secret their iconoclastic and subversive lives.

English children have lost their innocence, for their first lessons have been in the exploitation of their adult slave.

Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.

By all men bond to Nothing, Being slaves without a lord, By one blind idiot world obeyed, Too blind to be abhorred.

In most ages many countries have had part of their inhabitants in a state of slavery; yet it may be doubted whether slavery can ever be supposed the natural condition of man. It is impossible not to conceive that men in their original state were equal; and very difficult to imagine how one would be subjected to another but by violent compulsion. An individual may, indeed, forfeit his liberty by a crime; but he cannot by that crime forfeit the liberty of his children.

There are a lot of children in Afghanistan, but little childhood.

I grew up like a neglected weed, ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it. Then I was not happy or contented: every time I saw a white man I was afraid of being carried away.

When you are a child you are yourself and you know and see everything prophetically. And then suddenly something happens and you stop being yourself; you become what others force you to be. You lose your wisdom and your soul.

There is so much falsehood both at home and at school. At home one must not speak, and at school we have to stand and tell lies to the children.

They looked like two children," she told me. And that thought frightened her, because she'd always felt that only children are capable of everything.

The weakness of little children's limbs is innocent, not their souls.

Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey his master's commands when, in fact, he is obliged to. Most slaves of habit suffer from this delusion and so do some writers, enslaved by an all too personal style.

The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a wheel rolling on its own, a prime movement, a sacred Yes.

The greatest respect is owed to a child.

If you are not their slaves, you are rebels.

Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.

...No opening sermons concerning children with humps and fins for limbs, who nonetheless, immortal souls all, deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happy Meals.

To recommend a monarchy on account of the prosperity it gives the provinces seems to me like recommending that a man should have liberty to treat his children as slaves, if at the same time he treats his slaves with reasonable consideration.

There are cases where the slave does not know his servitude and where it is necessary to bring the seed of his liberation to him from the outside: his submission is not enough to justify the tyranny which is imposed upon him.