Serfs Quotes:

In antiquity slaves were, in all honesty called slaves. In the middle ages, they took the name of serfs. Nowadays they are called wage earners.

- Mikhail Bakunin

source: Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin (1980). “Bakunin on anarchism”

topic: Honesty, Names, Age, Serfs

An earthly kingdom cannot exist without inequality of persons. Some must be free, some serfs, some rulers, some subjects.

- Martin Luther

topic: Equality, Kingdoms, Persons, Character Education, Serfs

I would rather be a serf in a poor man's house and be above ground than reign among the dead.

- Homer

topic: Death, Suicide, Men, Serfs

Knowledge has always flowed upwards to bishops and kings, not down to serfs and slaves.

- Julian Assange

source: "Julian Assange rails against surveillance on Today programme" by Matthew Weaver, www.theguardian.com. January 2, 2014.

topic: Kings, Bishops, Slave, Serfs

I would rather be tied to the soil as a serf ... than be king of all these dead and destroyed.

- Homer

topic: Kings, Soil, Serfs

If you see yourself as a kingly type, then you need your serfs and your army and so on around you.

- Joni Mitchell

source: Interview with Joe Smith, jonimitchell.com. November 3, 1986.

topic: Army, Needs, Type, Serfs

Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

source: F. Scott Fitzgerald (2003). “The Great Gatsby”, p.97, Simon and Schuster

topic: Great Gatsby American Dream, Great Gatsby Book, Great Gatsby Important, Great Gatsby Gatsby, Serfs

Feudalism is an economic system where a few people own all the land and the others have no option but to be serfs on such a feudal estate. We now condemn feudalism. We condemn not merely the feudal lords but we condemn the whole structure of rules that sustained feudalism. I am asking people to think similarly about the world economy.

- Thomas Pogge

source: Source: www.truth-out.org

topic: Thinking, Land, People, Feudalism, Serfs

Hundreds of thousands and millions of wage slaves of capital and peasants downtrodden by the serf-owners are going to the slaughter for the dynastic interests of a handful of crowned brigands, for the profits of the bourgeoisie in its drive to plunder foreign lands.

- Vladimir Lenin

source: "Collected Works, Vol. 41". Book by Vladimir Lenin, 1960.

topic: Land, Bourgeoisie, Slave, Wage Slaves, Foreign Lands

Most Americans aren't the sort of citizens the Founding Fathers expected; they are contented serfs. Far from being active critics of government, they assume that its might makes it right.

- Joseph Sobran

topic: Father, Government, Empathy, Founding, Serfs

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?

- Henry David Thoreau

topic: Eye, Men, House, Pastures, Serfs

The crusades made great improvement in the condition of the serfs.

- John Lothrop Motley

source: John Lothrop Motley (1863). “The Rise of the Dutch Republic: Complete in One Volume”, p.18

topic: Improvement, Made, Crusades, Serfs

Philosophy is antipoetic. Philosophize about mankind and you brush aside individual uniqueness, which a poet cannot do without self-damage. Unless, for a start, he has a strong personal rhythm to vary his metrics, he is nothing. Poets mistrust philosophy. They know that once the heads are counted, each owner of a head loses his personal identify and becomes a number in some government scheme: if not as a slave or serf, at least as a party to the device of majority voting, which smothers personal views.

- Robert Graves

topic: Strong, Philosophy, Party, Strong Person, Personal Views

It is Mind which determines the change of Society, and it was because the mind at work was a Catholic mind that the slave became a serf and was on his way to becoming a peasant and a fully free man-a man free economically as well as politically. The whole spirit of the Church was for small property, and that spirit was slowly, instinctively, working for the establishment of small property throughout Christendom.

- Hilaire Belloc

source: Hilaire Belloc (2016). “The Crisis Of Civilization”, p.47, TAN Books

topic: Men, Catholic, Mind, Christendom, Serfs

Today the large organization is lord and master, and most of its employees have been desensitized much as were the medieval peasants who never knew they were serfs.

- Ralph Nader

topic: Organization, Today, Slavery, Serfs

The American people, taking one with another, constitute the most timorous, snivelling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goosesteppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages.

- H. L. Mencken

source: H. L. Mencken (2009). “Prejudices: Third Series”, p.10, Cosimo, Inc.

topic: People, Age, Flags, Christendom, Serfs

The law known as Marchetta, or Marquette, compelled newly married women to a most dishonorable servitude. They were regarded as the rightful prey of the Feudal Lord from one to three days after their marriage, and from this custom the eldest son of the serf was held as the son of the Lord.... Marquette was claimed by the Lord's Spiritual, as well as by the Lord's Temporal. The Church, indeed, was the bulwark of this base feudal claim.

- Matilda Joslyn Gage

topic: Spiritual, Son, Law, Servitude, Dishonorable

A serf-supporting and self-respecting democracy can plead no justification for the existence of child labor, no economic reason for chiseling workers' wages or stretching workers' hours.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

source: Franklin D. Roosevelt's message to Congress on Establishing Minimum Wages and Maximum Hours, May 24, 1937.

topic: Children, Self, Democracy, Child Labor, Serfs

...How can Americans living in the freest country in the world be 'slaves'? We don't even enjoy the liberty of serfs. ( A serf paid only 25% of his earnings to his feudal lord. How much income tax do you pay?) Don't kid yourselves, we're slaves. Slaves with weekends off.

- Kenneth W. Royce

topic: Country, Kids, Weekend, Serfs

To dine, drink champagne, raise a racket and make speeches about the people's consciousness, the people's conscience, freedom andso forth while servants in tails are scurrying around your table, just like serfs, and out in the severe cold on the street await coachmen--this is the same as lying to the holy spirit.

- Anton Chekhov

topic: Lying, People, Hypocrisy, Serfs

Jimi Hendrix once said, 'You will never hear surf music again.' Well, tonight, you will hear 'serf' music again -- S-E-R-F music.

- Jello Biafra

topic: Tonight, Surf, Hendrix, Serfs

As corporations gain in autonomous institutional power and be-come more detached from people and place, the human interest and the corporate interest increasingly diverge. It is almost as though we were being invaded by alien beings intent on coloniz­ing our planet, reducing us to serfs, and then excluding as many of us as possible.

- David Korten

topic: People, Corporations, Gains, Detached, Serfs

The real searcher after truth will not receive the old because it is old, or reject the new because it is new. He will not believe men because they are dead, or contradict them because they are alive. With him an utterance is worth the truth, the reason it contains, without the slightest regard to the author. He may have been a king or serf - a philosopher or servant, - but the utterance neither gains nor loses in truth or reason. Its value is absolutely independent of the fame or station of the man who gave it to the world.

- Robert Green Ingersoll

source: Robert Green Ingersoll (2004). “Superstition and Other Essays”

topic: Wisdom, Kings, Truth, Searchers, Serfs

. . . I fail to find a trace [in Protestantism] of any desire to set reason free. The most that can be discovered is a proposal to change masters. From being a slave of the papacy, the intellect was to become the serf of the Bible.

- Thomas Huxley

source: Thomas Henry Huxley (1967). “The Essence of T. H. Huxley: Selections Form His Writings”

topic: Religion, Desire, Failing, Protestantism, Serfs

The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them.

- John Dewey

source: John Dewey (1980). “The Middle Works, 1899-1924”, p.237, SIU Press

topic: Art, Knowledge, Class, Stigma, Serfs

I should rather labor as another's serf, in the home of a man without fortune, one whose livelihood was meager, than rule over all the departed dead.

- Homer

topic: Home, Men, Departed, Serfs

If on Judgement Day I were summoned by St. Peter to give testimony to the used-to-be sheriff's act of kindness, I would be unable to say anything in his behalf. His confidence that my uncle and every other Black man who heard of the Klan's coming ride would scurry under their houses to hide in chicken droppings was too humiliating to hear. Without waiting for Momma's thanks, he rode out of the yard, sure that things were as they should be and that he was a gentle squire, saving those deserving serfs from the laws of the land, which he condoned.

- Maya Angelou

topic: Uncles, Kindness, Men, Squires, St Peter

To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.

- Christopher Hitchens

source: "Hitch-22: A Memoir". Book by Christopher Hitchens, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 20, 2010.

topic: Yeats, Being A Dad, Thoughts Of Death, Serfs

If we remain fearful, then we will be further stripped of power as we barrel towards this neofeudalistic state where there is a world of masters and serfs, a kind of permanent underclass. That's what's happening; that's what's being created. Rapacious corporate business interests have shattered all kinds of regulations and controls. They have carried out a coup d'etat in slow motion. And it's over; they've won.

- Chris Hedges

source: Interview with David Barsamian, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. July 14, 2011.

topic: World, Regulation, Slow Motion, Serfs

Now from his breast into the eyes the ache of longing mounted, and he wept at last, his dear wife, clear and faithful, in his arms, longed for as the sunwarmed earth is longed for by a swimmer spent in rough water where his ship went down under Poseidon's blows, gale winds and tons of sea. Few men can keep alive through a big serf to crawl, clotted with brine, on kindly beaches in joy, in joy, knowing the abyss behind: and so she too rejoiced, her gaze upon her husband, her white arms round him pressed as though forever.

- Homer

source: Homer, Robert Fitzgerald (1963). “The Odyssey”, Anchor

topic: Beach, Husband, Eye, Poseidon, Serfs

Those times when I play on stage in front of lots of people, it's such an unusual and borderline unhealthy process, even though I love it and I really do it with humility. I don't have serfs getting me grapes after, or things like that.

- Gavin Rossdale

source: Source: collider.com

topic: Borderline, Serfs

The nation that would to-day disarm its soldiers and turn its people to the paths of peace would accomplish more to its building up than by all the war taxes wrong from its hostile and unwilling serfs

- Clarence Darrow

source: "Resist Not Evil". Book by Clarence Darrow, 1904.

topic: War, Building Up, People, Serfs

I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls, With vassals and serfs at my side, And of all who assembled within those walls, That I was the hope and the pride.

- Alfred Bunn

source: Michael William Balfe, Alfred Bunn (1856). “The Bohemian Girl: An Opera in Three Acts Performed by the Pyne and Harrison English Opera Troupe”, p.14

topic: Wall, Pride, Sides, Serfs

We preach free enterprise capitalism. We believe in it, we give our lives in war for it, but the closest most of us come to profiting from it are a few miserable shares of stock in a company that doesn't pay large enough dividends to keep a small mouse in cheese. The truth is, most of us are job serfs. At a time when invested capital returns 20 to 30 percent, we have no capital. We only have our wages and salaries, and a debt so high that something like 20c on every dollar we earn is spent to pay off what we owe.

- Nicholas von Hoffman

source: Nicholas Von Hoffman (1970). “Left at the post”, Crown

topic: Jobs, War, Believe, Serfs

According to the Tax Foundation, taxes now consume more than 38% of the average family's budget. That is more than is spent on food, clothing, housing, and transportation combined. Compare this to the plight of medieval serfs. They only had to give the lord of the manor one-third of their output - and they were considered slaves. So what does that make us?

- Daniel J. Mitchell

topic: Average, Giving, Liberty, Serfs

Return to Shaoshan I regret the passing, the dying, of the vague dream: my native orchards thirty-two years ago. Yet red banners roused the serfs, who seized three-pronged lances when the warlords raised whips in their black hands. We were brave and sacrifice was easy and we asked the sun, the moon, to alter the sky. Now I see a thousand waves of beans and rice and am happy. In the evening haze heroes are coming home.

- Mao Zedong

topic: Dream, Regret, Hero, Warlords, Whips

It was the Faith which gradually and indirectly transformed the slave into the serf, and the serf into the free peasant. . . . You will not be able to set up in a pagan or an heretical or a wholly indifferent society the institutions characteristic of economic freedom; you will not be able to curb competition which alone would be sufficient to destroy such freedom, nor pursue permanently and consecutively anyone part of the program. The thing must be done as a whole, and it can be done as a whole only by the ambient influence of Catholicism.

- Hilaire Belloc

topic: Competition, Would Be, Done, Curb, Ambient

Even men who were engaged in organizing debt-serf cultivation and debt-serf industrialism in the American cotton districts, in the old rubber plantations, and in the factories of India, China, and South Italy, appeared as generous supporters of and subscribers to the sacred cause of individual liberty.

- H. G. Wells

source: H. G. Wells (1933). “Shape Things Come”

topic: Men, Political, Liberty, Serfs

Admit that the press transferred the pontificate of Rome to Henry VIII-Admit that the press demolished in some sort the feudal system, and set the serfs and villains free; admit that the press demolished the monasteries, nunneries, and religious houses; into whose hands did all these alienated baronies, monasteries, and religious houses and lands fall? Into the hands of the democracy? Into the hands of serfs and villains? Serfs and villains were the only real democracy in those time. No. They fell into the hands of other aristocrats. . . .

- John Adams

topic: Religious, Time, Real, Henry V, Feudal System

According to the Tax Foundation, the average American worker works 127 days of the year just to pay his taxes. That means that government owns 36 percent of the average American's output-which is more than feudal serfs owed the robber barons. That 36 percent is more than the average American spends on food, clothing and housing. In other words, if it were not for taxes, the average American's living standard would at least double.

- Paul Craig Roberts

topic: Mean, Average, Years, Robber Baron, Output

When Death hath poured oblivion through my veins, And brought me home, as all are brought, to lie In that vast house, common to serfs and Thanes, I shall not die, I shall not utterly die, For beauty born of beauty-- that remains.

- Madison Cawein

source: MADISON CAWEIN (1899). “Myth and Romance”

topic: Lying, Home, House, Serfs

Furthermore, unlike Man's other great good friend the horse, the cat is no sweating serf of Man. The only labor she condescends to perform is to catch mice and rats, and that's fun.

- Vance Packard

topic: Horse, Fun, Cat, Serfs

The disquieting thing about newscaster-babble or editorial-speak is its ready availability as a serf idiom, a vernacular of deference. "Mr. Secretary, are we any nearer to bringing about a dialogue in this process ?

- Christopher Hitchens

source: Christopher Hitchens (2014). “For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports”, p.252, Atlantic Books Ltd

topic: Deference, Vernacular, Idiom, Serfs

the society which projects and undertakes the technological transformation of nature alters the base of domination by gradually replacing personal dependence (of the slave on the master, the serf on the lord of the manor, the lord on the donor of the fief, etc.) with dependence on the "objective order of things" (on economic laws, the market etc.).

- Herbert Marcuse

topic: Order, Law, Etc, Dependence, Serfs

If you feed them, if you feed the children, three square meals a day during the school year, how can you expect them to feed themselves in the summer? ... Wanton little waifs and serfs dependent on the State. Pure and simple.

- Rush Limbaugh

source: "Right-Wing Media Aren't Concerned About Helping The Poor, But They Sure Want To Help The Rich" by Mike Burns, www.mediamatters.org. February 7, 2012.

topic: Summer, Children, Stupid, School Years, Serfs

I should favour anything that would increase the present enormous authority of women and their creative action in their own homes. The average woman...is a despot; the average man is a serf.

- Gilbert K. Chesterton

topic: Women, Home, Average, Average Man, Serfs