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

  Honesty, Names, Age

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

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

  Martin Luther

  Religious, Humor, Equality

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

  Homer

  Death, Suicide, Men

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

  Julian Assange

  Kings, Bishops, Slave

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

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

  Homer

  Kings, Soil, Tied

  "Odyssey". Poem by Homer,

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

  Joni Mitchell

  Army, Needs, Type

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

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

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Great Gatsby American Dream, Great Gatsby Book, Great Gatsby Important

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

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• 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

  Thinking, Land, People

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• 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

  Land, Bourgeoisie, Slave

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

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• 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

  Father, Government, Empathy

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• 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

  Eye, Men, House

  Henry David Thoreau, Nancy L. Rosenblum (1996). “Thoreau: Political Writings”, p.24, Cambridge University Press

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

  John Lothrop Motley

  Improvement, Made, Crusades

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

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• 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

  Strong, Philosophy, Party

  Robert Graves, Patrick J. Quinn (2000). “Some speculations on literature, history, and religion”, Carcanet Press Ltd.

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• 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

  Men, Catholic, Mind

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

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• 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

  Organization, Slavery, Today

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• 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

  People, Age, Flags

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

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• 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

  Spiritual, Son, Law

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• 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

  Children, Self, Democracy

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

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• ...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

  Country, Kids, Weekend

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• 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

  Lying, People, Hypocrisy

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• 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

  Tonight, Surf, Hendrix

  Introducing the song "New Feudalism" with The No WTO Combo, November 30, 1999.

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• 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

  People, Corporations, Gains

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• 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

  Wisdom, Kings, Truth

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

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• . . . 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

  Religion, Desire, Failing

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

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• 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

  Art, Knowledge, Class

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

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