Servility Quotes

“I think that knowledge enslaves us, that at the base of all knowledge there is a servility, the acceptation of a way of life wherein each moment has meaning only in relation to another or others that will follow it.”
― Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

“This business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people’s convenience, is inherent in working-class life. A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive role. He does not act, he is acted upon. He feels himself the slave of mysterious authority and has a firm conviction that ‘they’ will never allow him to do this, that, and the other. Once when I was hop-picking I asked the sweated pickers (they earn something under sixpence an hour) why they did not form a union. I was told immediately that ‘they’ would never allow it. Who were ‘they’? I asked. Nobody seemed to know, but evidently ‘they’ were omnipotent.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“He who in given cases consents to obey his fellows with servility, and who submits his will, and even his thoughts, to their control, how can he pretend that he wishes to be free?”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

“... ξέρει να επιστρατεύει αριστοτεχνικά τη δουλοπρέπεια σαν ηρεμιστικό.”
― Petros Markaris, Περαίωση

“I concluded all the same from this first evening that his [Morel's] must be a vile nature, that he would not shrink from any act of servility if the need arose, and was incapable of gratitude. In which he resembled the majority of mankind.”
― Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

“Для российского обывателя телевизор — это источник «правильной» позиции, ретрансляция которой оберегает от соприкосновения с госмашиной. Нечто вроде комсомольского значка на лацкане пиджака — эдакий знак публичной лояльности, который подобно оберегу защищает тебя от опричнины.

В государстве, где люди не могут влиять на власть, телевизионная риторика выполняет роль компаса. Она показывает тебе — как нужно высказываться по тем или иным темам, чтобы не навлечь на себя беду. Тот, кто ее ретранслирует — вовсе не обязательно ее разделяет. Это лишь коллективное пение гимна на утреннем поднятии флага: правильное выражение лица и патриотическая поза защищают от обвинений в нелояльности, которые могут закончиться житейскими проблемами.”
― Павел Казарин

“Preferential tributes of respect in words and manners even to those who have no authority in the State - reverences, obeisances (compliments) and courtly phrases marking with the utmost precision every distinction in status (something altogether different from courtesy, which must also be reciprocal) - the Du, Er, Ihr and Sie, or Ew. Wohledeln, Hochedeln, Hochedelgeborenen, Wohlgeborenen (ohe, iam satis est!) as forms of address, a pedantry in which the Germans seem to outdo any other people in the world (except possibly the Indian castes): does not all this prove that there is a widespread propensity to servility in men? But one who makes himself a worm cannot complain if people step on him.”
― Immanuel Kant, The Doctrine of Virtue: Part 2 of The Metaphysic of Morals

“By comparison with our ideas of liberation, emancipation and individual autonomy, which exhaust themselves chasing their own shadows, how much more subtle, and proud at the same time, is the idea, which still survives in oriental wisdom, that someone else has control over your life, is planning it, determining it, satisfying it, according to the terms of an electoral pact by which you agree to stand down, when things are going against you, from something which, in any case, does not belong to you and which it is much more pleasant to enjoy without constantly having to take responsibility for it at every waking moment. There is nothing to prevent you, in return, from looking after someone else’s life—something people are often more skilled at than looking after their own—and so on, from one person to the next, with each of us being relieved of the burden of living, truly free and no longer exposed to their own madness, but only to the ritual or romantic intervention of the other in the process of their own life.

The ultimate achievement is to live beyond the end, by any means whatever.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“The duty of an Usher is to serve, not to be servile.”
― Utibe Samuel Mbom, The Event Usher’s Handbook

“I had often doubted; now I was convinced: there were still noble beings among us in whose hearts knowledge of the higher order was preserved and perpetuated. A lofty example enjoins us to follow, and I swore before this head that for all the future I would cast my lot with the solitary and free rather than the triumphant and servile.”
― Ernst Jünger, On the Marble Cliffs

“Таков уж русский человек: страсть сильная зазнаться с тем, который бы хотя одним чином был его повыше, и шапочное знакомство с графем или князем для него лучше всяких тесных дружеских отношений.”
― Николай Гоголь, Мертвые души. Избранное

“The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn’t betray it I’d be ashamed of myself.”
― Noam Chomsky