“Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you?”

— Étienne de La Boétie , book Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)
Context: Poor, wretched, and stupid peoples, nations determined on your own misfortune and blind to your own good! You let yourselves be deprived before your own eyes of the best part of your revenues; your fields are plundered, your homes robbed, your family heirlooms taken away. You live in such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as your own; and it would seem that you consider yourselves lucky to be loaned your property, your families, and your very lives. All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you go bravely to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death. He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you. Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? What could he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves? You sow your crops in order that he may ravage them, you install and furnish your homes to give him goods to pillage; you rear your daughters that he may gratify his lust; you bring up your children in order that he may confer upon them the greatest privilege he knows — to be led into his battles, to be delivered to butchery, to be made the servants of his greed and the instruments of his vengeance; you yield your bodies unto hard labor in order that he may indulge in his delights and wallow in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him the stronger and the mightier to hold you in check.

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Étienne de La Boétie 12

French judge, writer and philosopher 1530–1563

Patrick Süskind book The Pigeon

Source: The Pigeon

“A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes, but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena and react to them, but they are not ideas. You cannot think about them.”

Rex Stout (1886–1975) American writer

Life, "Author Rex Stout vs. the F.B.I."

“And the moment you care that much, a man has you. He owns a little piece of your soul, and he can beat you to death with it.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Micah

Source: Micah

“Of what benefit is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but he does not have works? That faith cannot save him, can it? If a brother or a sister is lacking clothing and enough food for the day, yet one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but you do not give them what they need for their body, of what benefit is it? So, too, faith by itself, without works, is dead.”

James, son of Zebedee major religious figure in Christian tradition and one of the Twelve Apostles

James 2:14-17 http://www.jw.org/en/publications/bible/nwt/books/james/2/, NWT

“I'll tell you where he beats me though and where he beats the world. He doesn't give a damn about what the enemy does out of his sight, but it scares me like hell.”

William T. Sherman (1820–1891) American General, businessman, educator, and author.

Comments to James H. Wilson (22 October 1864), as quoted in Under the Old Flag: Recollections of Military Operations in the War for the Union, the Spanish War, the Boxer Rebellion, etc Vol. 2 (1912) by James Harrison Wilson, p. 17.
1860s, 1864
Context: I am a damned sight smarter man than Grant. I know more about military history, strategy, and grand tactics than he does. I know more about supply, administration, and everything else than he does. I'll tell you where he beats me though and where he beats the world. He doesn't give a damn about what the enemy does out of his sight, but it scares me like hell. … I am more nervous than he is. I am more likely to change my orders or to countermarch my command than he is. He uses such information as he has according to his best judgment; he issues his orders and does his level best to carry them out without much reference to what is going on about him and, so far, experience seems to have fully justified him.

“You don’t have to always fight. Be a girl. Show him that he’s a man, and it’s a good thing energetically to do. … [Their insecurity] depends on how many blow jobs you give them.”

Gwyneth Paltrow (1972) American actress, singer, and food writer

In an interview with Howard Stern. http://www.thesuperficial.com/gwyneth-paltrow-brad-pitt-jay-z-beyonce-ben-affleck-blowjobs-howard-stern-interview-01-2015 (January 15, 2015)

“There's this man who lives in the sky, and he has ten things he doesn't want you to do, and you'll burn for a long time if you do them. But he loves you.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

“We must have the can do spirit. For example, why must we lose to Singapore every time? Beat them at their own game, you can do it. Penang has beaten them many times.”

Lim Guan Eng (1960) Finance Minister of Malaysia

Lim Guan Eng (2018) cited in " Guan Eng: Let’s give Singapore some competition https://www.thestar.com.my/business/business-news/2018/06/19/guan-eng-lets-give-singapore-some-competition/" on The Star Online, 19 June 2018

“Things have come to such a point in good society that, if you want to be polite, you can no longer ask a man from what country he comes, for if he is a Norman or a Calabrian he has, when he tells you so, to beg your pardon, or, if he is from the Pays de Vaud, to say he is Swiss. Nor will you ask a nobleman what his arms are, for if he does not know the jargon of heraldry you will embarrass him. You must not compliment a gentleman on his fine hair, for if it is a wig, he may think you are mocking him, nor praise a man or a woman on their fine teeth, for they may be false.”

Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice

History of My Life (trans. Trask 1967), 1997 reprint, v. 8, chapter 9, p. 243
Referenced

“The doctor begins to lose freedom.... First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then doctors aren’t equally divided geographically. So a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him, you can't live in that town. They already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it's only a short step to dictating where he will go.... All of us can see what happens once you establish the precedent that the government can determine a man's working place and his working methods, determine his employment. From here it's a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay. And pretty soon your son won't decide, when he's in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine (1961 LP)
1960s

“Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you?”

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Étienne de La Boétie 12

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