Source: 1900s, Up From Slavery (1901), Chapter XVI: Europe
Context: In one thing, at least, I feel sure that the English are ahead of Americans, and that is, they have learned how to get more out of life. The home life of the English seems to me to be about as perfect as anything can be. Everything moves like clockwork. I was impressed, too, with the deference that the servants show to their "masters" and "mistresses" - terms which I suppose would not be tolerated in America. The English servant expects, as a rule, to be nothing but a servant, and so he perfects himself in the art to a degree that no class of servants in America has yet reached. In our country the servant expects to become, in a few years, a "master" himself. Which system is preferable? I will not venture an answer.
“The more servants a master has, the more enemies he has.”
Act I, scene II. — (Polinico).
Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 432.
La Calandria (c. 1507)
Original
Un padrone quanti ha più servi tanti più ha inimici.
Polinico: atto I, scena II
La Calandria
Variant: Un padrone, quanti ha più servi, tanti più ha inimici.
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Bernardo Dovizi 13
Italian cardinal and playwright 1470–1520Related quotes
“The free individual has been justified as his own master; the state as his servant.”
Commencement Address at Columbia University http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/education/bsa/citizenship_merit_badge/eisenhower_citizenship_quotations.pdf (1 June 1949)
1940s
“Esteem money neither more nor less than it deserves, it is a good servant and a bad master.”
N'estime l'argent ni plus ni moins qu'il ne vaut: c'est un bon serviteur et un mauvais maître.
Preface to Théatre complet de Al. Dumas fils (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1863) vol. 1, p. 4; translation from Ernest Smith Fields of Adventure (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1924) p. 99.
Speech in Leeds (13 March 1925), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 61-62.
1925
“Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?”
"A Plea for Wilderness Hunting Grounds" [1925]; Published in Aldo Leopold's Southwest, David E. Brown and Neil B. Carmony (eds.) 1990 , p. 160.
1920s
“In our minds, lad. In our minds. The traitor, the self; the self that cries I want to live; let the world burn so long as I can live! The little traitor soul in us, in the dark, like the worm in the apple.”
Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 9, "Orm Embar" (Arren and Ged)
IV, 3
Variant translation: The good man, though a slave, is free; the wicked, though he reigns, is a slave, and not the slave of a single man, but — what is worse — the slave of as many masters as he has vices.
The City of God (early 400s)
Context: The dominion of bad men is hurtful chiefly to themselves who rule, for they destroy their own souls by greater license in wickedness; while those who are put under them in service are not hurt except by their own iniquity. For to the just all the evils imposed on them by unjust rulers are not the punishment of crime, but the test of virtue. Therefore the good man, although he is a slave, is free; but the bad man, even if he reigns, is a slave, and that not of one man, but, what is far more grievous, of as many masters as he has vices; of which vices when the divine Scripture treats, it says, “For of whom any man is overcome, to the same he is also the bond-slave.”