A Quote by Toussaint Louverture

I was born a slave, but nature gave me a soul of a free man.

Toussaint Louverture

Quote Topics

Born Free Free Man Gave Man Me Nature Slave Soul

Quote Author

Toussaint Louverture
Haitian - Leader
May 20, 1743 - April 7, 1803

Every man having been born free and master of himself, no one else may under any pretext whatever subject him without his consent. To assert that the son of a slave is born a slave is to assert that he is not born a man.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Whenever a man believes that he has the exact truth from God, there is in that man no spirit of compromise. He has not the modesty born of the imperfections of human nature; he has the arrogance of theological certainty and the tyranny born of ignorant assurance. Believing himself to be the slave of God, he imitates his master, and of all tyrants the worst is a slave in power.

Robert Green Ingersoll

We found water. We passed into a more fertile country where were grass and fruit. We found the trail to Babylon because the soul of a free man looks at life as a series of problems to be solved and solves them, while the soul of a slave whines, 'What can I do who am but a slave?

George S. Clason

The good man, though a slave, is free; the wicked, though he reigns, is a slave, and not the slave of a single man, but- what is worse - the slave of as many masters as he has vices.

Saint Augustine

The soul of the slave, the soul of the "little man," is as dear to me as the soul of the great.

A. D. Gordon

Cassius Clay is a name that white people gave to my slave master. Now that I am free, that I don't belong anymore to anyone, that I'm not a slave anymore, I gave back their white name, and I chose a beautiful African one.

Muhammad Ali

I was born a slave-was the child of slave parents-therefore I came upon the earth free in God-like thought, but fettered in action.

Elizabeth Keckley

I could, as a free man, look across the bay toward the Eastern Shore where I was born a slave.

Frederick Douglass

Hindustan had become free. Pakistan had become independent soon after its inception but man was still slave in both these countries -- slave of prejudice … slave of religious fanaticism … slave of barbarity and inhumanity.

Saadat Hasan Manto

I blame Rousseau, myself. "Man is born free", indeed. Man is not born free, he is born attached to his mother by a cord and is not capable of looking after himself for at least seven years (seventy in some cases).

Katharine Whitehorn

The man born and bred a slave, even if freed, never loses wholly the feeling or manner of a slave.

Mary C. Ames

Like the amazing story of Anthony Johnson. This man was a slave, then became free, accumulated 250 acres, and even had his own slave, a black man who took him to court in Virginia in 1654.That man argued that he should be freed like an indentured servant. But Johnson, who we believe was a pure African from Angola, said, "No way, you're my slave." And the court agreed.

Henry Louis Gates

Slavery's crime against humanity did not begin when one people defeated and enslaved its enemies (though of course this was bad enough), but when slavery became an institution in which some men were 'born' free and others slave, when it was forgotten that it was man who had deprived his fellow-men of freedom, and when the sanction for the crime was attributed to nature.

Hannah Arendt

There are free men with the spirit of a slave, and slaves whose spirit is full of freedom. He who is true to his inner self is a free man, while he whose entire life is merely a stage for what is good and beautiful in the eyes of others, is a slave.

Abraham Isaac Kook

If a man carries his horse out of a slave State into a free one, be does not lose his property interest in him; but if he carries his slave into a free State, the law makes him free.