Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.

I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of "work" because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don't always want to do. Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery. People are working every minute. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.

We are all born slaves, and we must continue so;

Is base in kind, and born to be a slave.

Baptism enslaved me.

Did we not, at the very moment of birth, stumble into agonizing captivity? A prison, a prison with bars and chains everywhere!

Some people are by nature slaves and will always be so.

But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.

I was a king and a king's heir and now I am a slave.

A despotic power makes slaves.

Civilised man is born and dies a slave. The infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the corpse is nailed down in his coffin. All his life long man is imprisoned by our institutions.

Now, I do not use that word, "slavery" lightly. It evokes obviously one of the most painful chapters in our nation’s history. But around the world, there’s no denying the awful reality. When a man, desperate for work, finds himself in a factory or on a fishing boat or in a field, working, toiling, for little or no pay, and beaten if he tries to escape -- that is slavery. When a woman is locked in a sweatshop, or trapped in a home as a domestic servant, alone and abused and incapable of leaving -- that’s slavery. When a little boy is kidnapped, turned into a child soldier, forced to kill or be killed -- that’s slavery. When a little girl is sold by her impoverished family -- girls my daughters’ age -- runs away from home, or is lured by the false promises of a better life, and then imprisoned in a brothel and tortured if she resists -- that’s slavery. It is barbaric, and it is evil, and it has no place in a civilized world.

To have a child is to give fate a hostage.

To assert that the son of a slave is born a slave is to assert that he is not born a man.