#slave

Life has been reduced to a series of long periods of boredom in the office punctuated by high-octane “experiences” which you can rack up on your list of things to do before you die. That’s not really living: that is slavery with the occasional circus thrown in. ↗

— Tom Hodgkinson

#life #slavery #experience

It was pitiful for a person born in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humble and hearty outpourings of loyalty toward their king and Church and nobility; as if they had any more occasion to love and honor king and Church and noble than a slave has to love and honor the lash, or a dog has to love and honor the stranger that kicks him! Why, dear me, ANY kind of royalty, howsoever modified, ANY kind of aristocracy, howsoever pruned, is rightly an insult; but if you are born and brought up under that sort of arrangement you probably never find it out for yourself, and don't believe it when somebody else tells you. It is enough to make a body ashamed of his race to think of the sort of froth that has always occupied its thrones without shadow of right or reason, and the seventh-rate people that have always figured as its aristocracies -- a company of monarchs and nobles who, as a rule, would have achieved only poverty and obscurity if left, like their betters, to their own exertions... The truth was, the nation as a body was in the world for one object, and one only: to grovel before king and Church and noble; to slave for them, sweat blood for them, starve that they might be fed, work that they might play, drink misery to the dregs that they might be happy, go naked that they might wear silks and jewels, pay taxes that they might be spared from paying them, be familiar all their lives with the degrading language and postures of adulation that they might walk in pride and think themselves the gods of this world. And for all this, the thanks they got were cuffs and contempt; and so poor-spirited were they that they took even this sort of attention as an honor. ↗

— Mark Twain

#government #monarchy #religion #serfdom #slavery

Go back to bed, Cowan. I want no promises from you. ↗

— Sandi Layne

#ireland #norway #slaves #vikings #historical-fiction

Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit. ↗

— Irvin D. Yalom

#jealousy #marriage #possession #jealousy

To be one's own master is to be the slave of self. ↗

— Natalie Clifford Barney

#own #self #slave

I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money - has turned himself into a slave. ↗

— Joseph Campbell

#himself #i #i think #into #job

Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children. ↗

— Albert Camus

#breathe #children #clean #clean air #disenfranchised

Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal. ↗

— Charles Darwin

#equal #like #made #our #slaves

Machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don’t hate: only the unloved hate, the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers, don’t fight for slavery, fight for liberty! You the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure! Then, in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite! Let us fight for a new world, a decent world . . . ↗

— Charles Chaplin

#heart #humanity #liberty #love #machines

I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted. ↗

— Frederick Douglass

#i #know #out #slave #things