Because I was born a slave, I love liberty more than you.

The line turns a presumed disadvantage—being “born a slave”—into moral and political authority. Börne suggests that those who have lived under coercion grasp the value of liberty more intensely than those who inherit it as a social norm. Implicitly, it rebukes complacent “free” citizens whose attachment to freedom may be abstract, untested, or merely rhetorical. The statement also frames liberty as experiential knowledge: oppression educates desire. In a broader liberal-republican register often associated with Börne, it argues that the most credible advocates of freedom are those who have paid its absence in suffering, and therefore will defend it with greater urgency and sincerity.