When human statecraft attaches a chain to the feet of a free man, whom it makes a slave in contempt of nature and citizenship, eternal justice rivets the other end about the tyrant's neck.
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Fragment 3 (1794). [Source: Saint-Just, Fragments sur les institutions républicaines]Louis Antoine de Saint-Just
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I will be candid. I believe God is a just God, rewarding and punishing us exactly as we act well or ill. I believe that such reward and punishment follow necessarily from His will as revealed in natural law, as well as in the Bible. I believe that as the highest justice is the highest mercy, so He is a merciful God. That the guilty should suffer the measure of penalty which their guilt has incurred, is justice. What we call mercy is not the remission of this, but rather the remission of the extremity of the sentence attached to the act, when we find something in the nature of the causes which led to the act which lightens the moral guilt of the agent. That each should have his exact due is Just — is the best for himself. That the consequence of his guilt should he transferred from him to one who is innocent (although that innocent one he himself willing to accept it), whatever else it be, is not justice. We are mocking the word when we call it such. If I am to use the word justice in any sense at all which human feeling attaches to it, then to permit such transfer is but infinitely deepening the wrong, and seconding the first fault by greater injustice. I am speaking only of the doctrine of the atonement in its human aspect, and as we are to learn anything from it of the divine nature or of human duty.
James Anthony Froude
As a slave one cannot undertake obligations without the consent of one’s master. As a citizen one cannot undertake obligations unless the legal system of the State in which one holds citizenship permits one to do so. Neither a slave nor a citizen is a free person, although those who are held as slaves or citizens may well be free persons: it is just that their freedom is not respected.
Frank Van Dun
... [Slave] trade … is the most shocking violation of the law of nature, has a direct tendency to diminish … liberty, and makes every dealer in it a tyrant, from the director of an African company to the petty chapman [peddler]…. It is a clear truth, that those who every day barter away other men's liberty will soon care little for their own.
James Otis
Lord Byron makes man after his own image, woman after his own heart; the one is a capricious tyrant, the other a yielding slave.
Lord Byron
If e'er thy breast with freedom glow'd,
And spurn'd a tyrant's chain,
Let not thy strong oppressive force
A free-born mouse detain.Anna Letitia Barbauld
Saint-Just, Louis Antoine de
Saint-Laurent, Yves
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