Quotes About Servility

To seek power by servility to the people is a disgrace, but to maintain it by terror, violence, and oppression is not a disgrace only, but an injustice.

During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.

Such is the nature of crowds: either they are humble and servile or arrogant and dominating. They are incapable of making moderate use of freedom, which is the middle course, or of keeping it.

It is because of the servility of photography that I am fundamentally contemptuous of this chance invention which will never be an art but which plagiarizes nature by means of optics. (1848)

The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.

Among the many strange servilities mistaken for pieties, one of the least lovely is that which hopes to flatter God by despising the world, and vilifying human nature.

I was always graceful and cheerful, empty-minded, as one now perfects servility

Religion fosters servility and solipsism.

A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs.

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?

The man who in given cases consents to obey his fellows with servility, and who submits his activity and even his opinions to their control, can have no claim to rank as a free citizen.

One must not mix up prudence with gestures of servility.

Where in this wide world can man find nobility without pride, friendship without envy or beauty without vanity? Here, where grace is laced with muscle, and strength by gentleness confined. He serves without servility; he has fought without enmity. There is nothing so powerful, nothing less violent, there is nothing so quick, nothing more patient. England's past has been borne on his back. All our history is his industry; we are his heirs, he our inheritance. The Horse!" ~ Ronald Duncan

I have noticed that the adulation of women is not the same as that of men. The latter smacks of servility; the first can be confused with affection.

but not by habits of war nor by open magnanimity, but he shall grow great by fraudulent and clandestine arts; because he was on the one hand most impious, and on the other, of a servile disposition, as we have formerly said.

Servility always curdles into rage in the end.

The superior thing, in this as in other departments of life, was to be late. Lateness showed that serene contempt for the illusion we call time which is so necessary to ensure the respect of others and oneself. Only the servile are punctual...

We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial—whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit.

We exhort the compromisers to open their hearts to truth, to free themselves of their wretched and blind circumspection, of their intellectual arrogance, and of the servile fear which dries up their souls and paralyzes their movements.

These books can be read, independently of their time and place, as a strong preventive medicine against the mentality of servility, and especially against the lethal temptation to exchange freedom for security: a bargain that invariably ends up with the surrender of both.

The sovereign being is burdened with a servitude that crushes him, and the condition of free men is deliberate servility.

A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs...

Su generosidad es siempre dinero dado a usura. Su amistad es una complacencia servil o una adulación provechosa.

Il obéit donc ; mais la hardiesse de son désir protesta contre la servilité de sa conduite, et, par une sorte d'hypocrisie naïve, il estima que cette défense de la voir était pour lui comme un droit de l'aimer.