No one is truly free, they are a slave to wealth, fortune, the law, or other people restraining them from acting according to their will.

If someone pays you for anything other than a specific transaction, you are a slave.

Man’s freedom is lacking if somebody else controls what he needs, for need may result in man’s enslavement of man.

Even eternally free people are enslaved by the process of living.

A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd. He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work.

They are not free at all. They are essentially our prisoners.

[A]s long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if meaningful.

Ah! there is not in the world a single man free; for he is either a slave to money or to fortune, or else the people in their thousands or the fear of public prosecution prevents him from following the dictates of his heart.

The people of a nation are enslaved when, together, they are helpless to institute effective change, when the people serve the government more than the government serves them.

We feel as if we were hard labor convicts where everything but our feeding has been made subject to iron rules. We have become lost as human beings, and have been turned into slaves.

None can be free who is a slave to, and ruled by, his passions.

Yet that intelligent, enterprising, noble-hearted man was a chattel! Liable, by the laws of a country that calls itself civilized, to be sold with horses and pigs!

I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money [not for purpose or passion]- has turned himself into a slave.

The human beings who possess the dominion of land and machinery and compel others, in order to obtain the essentials of existence, to serve them, are as truly masters of slaves as they who exact blood from the dorsals of their fellows with literal slave whips.