Antonio Negri quote: “The refusal of work and authority, or really the refusal of voluntary servitude, is the beginning of liberatory politic…”

“They [the government] really want to maintain power. At the same time, they refuse to communicate. They refuse to have good intentions. They refuse to be sincere. How can that last?”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2010-, Ai Weiwei: The Dissident, 2011

“When the state murders, it assumes an authority I refuse to concede: the authority of perfect knowledge in final things.”

John Leonard (1939–2008) American critic, writer, and commentator

"Perfect Knowledge in Final Things" (p. 110)
Private Lives in the Imperial City (1979)

“A soldier of the civil authority must be taught not to kill men and to refuse to do so if he is commanded, and to refuse to take an oath; if he is unwilling to comply, he must be rejected.”

Hippolytus of Rome (170–235) 3rd-century theologian in the Christian Church

Apostolic Tradition

“The fundamental political question is why do people obey a government. The answer is that they tend to enslave themselves, to let themselves be governed by tyrants. Freedom from servitude comes not from violent action, but from the refusal to serve. Tyrants fall when the people withdraw their support.”

Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) American economist of the Austrian School, libertarian political theorist, and historian

Introduction to Étienne de La Boétie's Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (1975), p. 39 http://books.google.com/books?id=6o-8P3iqf7IC&pg=PA39

“The fundamental political question is why do people obey a government. The answer is that they tend to enslave themselves, to let themselves be governed by tyrants. Freedom from servitude comes not from violent action, but from the refusal to serve. Tyrants fall when the people withdraw their support.”

Étienne de La Boétie (1530–1563) French judge, writer and philosopher

This quote is a paraphrase of the contents of the first chapter of Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. The quote appears in an edition titled Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude edited by Murray Rothbard and Harry Kurz (1975), p. 39 http://books.google.com/books?id=6o-8P3iqf7IC&pg=PA39
Disputed

“Never refuse to do a kindness unless the act would work great injury to yourself, and never refuse to take a drink— — under any circumstances.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

“To joke in the face of danger is the supreme politeness, a delicate refusal to cast oneself as a tragic hero.”

Edmond Rostand (1868–1918) French writer

Speaking to the Académie française in 1903, as quoted by John Lahr in "Fighting and Writing" in The New Yorker (12 November 2007) http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/theatre/2007/11/12/071112crth_theatre_lahr

“Political realism refuses to identify the moral aspirations of a particular nation with the moral laws that govern the universe.”

Hans Morgenthau book Politics Among Nations

Six Principles of Political Realism, § 5.
Politics Among Nations (1948)
Context: Political realism refuses to identify the moral aspirations of a particular nation with the moral laws that govern the universe. As it distinguishes between truth and opinion, so it distinguishes between truth and idolatry. All nations are tempted — and few have been able to resist the power for long — to clothe their own aspirations and action in the moral purposes of the universe. To know that nations are subject to the moral law is one thing, while to pretend to know with certainty what is good and evil in the relations among nations is quite another. There is a world of difference between the belief that all nations stand under the judgment of God, inscrutable to the human mind, and the blasphemous conviction that God is always on one's side and that what one wills oneself cannot fail to be willed by God also.

“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”

Plato The Republic

Source: Republic

“As I refuse violence, I refuse to serve the violent.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book The Eye of the Heron

Source: The Eye of the Heron (1978), Chapter 1 (p. 13)

“The refusal of work and authority, or really the refusal of voluntary servitude, is the beginning of liberatory politics.”

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Antonio Negri 63

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