Erik Roos > Recent Status Updates

“But neither Dessalines’ army nor his ferocity won the victory. It was the people. They burned San Domingo flat so that at the end of the war it was a charred desert. Why do you burn everything? asked a French officer of a prisoner. We have a right to burn what we cultivate because a man has a right to dispose of his own labour, was the reply of this unknown anarchist.”

“If you wish to keep your liberty use your arms on the day that the white authorities ask you for them, because any such request is the infallible sign and precursor of the return to slavery.” ~ Sonthonax

“In overthrowing me, you have cut down in San Domingo only the trunk of the tree of liberty. It will spring up again by the roots for they are numerous and deep.” ~ Toussaint

“Once more the masses had received a shattering blow— not from the bullets of the enemy, but from where the masses most often receive it, from their own trembling leaders.”

‘In every revolution there are many who hesitate and though decisive action may not be immediately effective, vacillation is certain to lose them all.’

Uncover your breasts, you will see them branded by the iron of slavery. During ten years, what have you not undertaken for liberty? Your masters slain or put to flight; the English humiliated by defeat; discord extinguished, a land of slavery purified by fire & evolving more beautiful than ever under liberty; these are your labors & these the fruits of your labours. & the foe wishes to snatch both out of your hands

“You are going to fight against men who have neither faith, law nor religion. They promise you liberty, they intend your servitude. Why have so many ships traversed the ocean, if not to throw you again into chains? They disdain to recognize in you submissive children, and if you are not their slaves you are rebels. The mother-country, misled by the Consul, is no longer anything for you but a stepmother…”

“… Bear in mind that the soil bathed with our sweat must not furnish our enemies with the smallest sustenance. Tear up the roads with shot; throw corpses and horses into all the fountains, burn and annihilate everything in order that those who have come to reduce us to slavery may have before their eyes the image of that hell which they deserve.” ~ Toussaint

“That calm confidence in its capacity to deceive is a mark of the mature ruling class. This accounts for its wild fury when it runs up against the type which never pays an attention to its most solemn protestations.”

“[Toussaint] knew French, British, and Spanish imperialists for the insatiable gangsters that they were, that there is no oath too sacred for them to break, no crime, deception, treachery, cruelty, destruction of human life and property which they would not commit against those who could not defend themselves.”

“I shall always receive with pleasure the reprimands that you address to me. When I deserve them it will be a proof of the friendship that you have for me.” ~ Toussaint L’Ouverture

“And when he met the shadow in this final end of his folly, he thought, maybe at least he could grip the thing even as it gripped him, and drag it with the weight of his body and the weight of his own death down into the darkness of the deep sea, from which, so held, it might not rise again. So at least his death would put an end to the evil he had loosed by living.”

“At the spring […] I named you, a stream that falls from the mountains to the sea. A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea [..] there lies your hope of strength.”

“The longer a man stays in a form not his own, the longer this peril.”

“When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity.”

“If it is necessary to hide in a double and triple range of hills, I will show you the way. We shall have no other asylum than cannons, no other food than water and bananas, but we shall live and die free.” ~ Sonthonax

“The struggle of classes ends either in the reconstruction of society or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”

“Those in power never give way, and admit defeat only to plot and scheme to regain their lost power and privilege.”

“It is their own language, and they can lie in it, twisting the true words to false ends, catching the unwary hearer in a maze of mirrorwords each of which reflects the truth and none of which leads anywhere.”

“The hunger of a dragon is slow to wake, but hard to sate.”

“And the truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he *must* do . . .”

“Thus to Ged, who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given that gift only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakable trust.”

“Then and only then did Toussaint come to an unalterable decision from which he never wavered and for which he died. Complete liberty for all, to be attained and held by their own strength. The most extreme revolutionaries are formed by circumstances.”

“A mage can control only what is near him, what he can name exactly and wholly. And this is well. If it were not so, the wickedness of the powerful or the folly of the wise would long ago have sought to change what cannot be changed, and Equilibrium would fail. The unbalanced sea would overwhelm the islands where we perilously dwell, and in the old silence all voices and all names would be lost.”

“…it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.”

“But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.”

“But phases of a revolution are not decided in parliaments, they are only registered there.”

“The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.”

“… after a long moment he opens his eyes and the cell comes crashing down on him, steel and stone, making him know he is alone.”

“The mind is like an object that picks up dust. The object doesn’t know, any more then the mind does, why what clings to it clings. But once it is lights on you, it doesn’t go away…”