Quotes About Feudalism

A lord who does not distribute wealth is a lord who will lose the allegiance of his men

Generally speaking, these Christians want basic changes inspired by the gospel to infuse their traditional, broader understanding of "divine law." They want the right to choose their own clergy. They want an end to feudal taxes and fees they consider burdensome and unjust. They want access to shared woods, fields, and streams for their use. And they want the abolition of traditional serfdom and the oppressive conditions it entails.

Ever since the end of Medieval feudalism, and the writings of John Locke, we have understood the importance of being able to buy and sell one's own property, including books and watches, both for reasons of economics and liberty.

You look at us and you see oppression; we see stability and harmony. You see corruption; we see ties of family, friendship, and mutual support. You see feudalism, we see mutual responsibility. You see the oppression of women, we see the defense of modesty.

The institution of monarchy developed during the Middle Ages against the backdrop of the previously endemic struggles between feudal power agencies. The monarchy presented itself as a referee, aa power capable of putting an end to war, violence, and pillage and saying no to these struggles and private feuds. It made itself acceptable by allocating itself a juridical and negative function, albeit one whose limits it naturally began at once to overstep.

Labour had become expensive and your average lord could now make more money out of sheep than he could out of his peasants. There was more wool on sheep, for a start, and you could also eat them – which is possible with peasants but socially taboo – so the lords started to throw the expensive, troublesome and uneatable peasants off their land and replace them with sheep.

Thus the castle of each feudal chieftain became a school of chivalry, into which any noble youth, whose parents were from poverty unable to educate him to the art of war, was readily received.

We need wealthy dogs off the seats of power. They're taking us back to feudalism and I really don't want that. But I'm very far from being a socialist.

The reason why China suffers bitterly from endless wars is because of the existence of feudal lords and kings.

Marx here saw all production up to that point as alienated. Alienation did not begin with capitalism, or even with feudalism. It has been the companion of humanity ever since the beginning. He did not, as is often asserted, have any notion of an Edenic primitive condition.

That is what capitalism is—a version of feudalism in which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings. But the hierarchy remains. And so we still hand over our lives' labor, under duress, to feed rulers who do no real work.

We modern Marxists regard socialism as a historically brief transitional stage between feudalism and capitalism, necessary only in backward countries.

Labour had become expensive and your average lord could now make more money out of sheep than he could out of his peasants. There was more wool on sheep, for a start, and you could also eat them – which is possible with peasants but socially taboo – so the lords started to throw the expensive, troublesome and uneatable peasants off their land and replace them with sheep. The

Capitalism, like feudalism and slavery before it, is the most enduring, insidious and compelling structure by which a parasitic minority of aristocratic families gets to monopolize life as you know it, and doom You People, the majority, to an insectoid life of debt slavery in office cubicles.

La historia del liberalismo mexicano y de su triunfo fue, en buena medida, la historia de una coerción modernizadora sobre un país sellado por sus tradiciones feudales.

The trick isn't to fight the aristocracy, it's to find one who isn't too terrible, who has his hands on the reins of power, and make friends. Make yourself useful. The quid pro quo in feudalism is the protection of the lord from the marauders sent forth by the other lords.

For every social ill the panacea of Wealth has been urged,—wealth to overthrow the remains of the slave feudalism; wealth to raise the cracker Third Estate; wealth to employ the black serfs, and the prospect of wealth to keep them working; wealth as the end and aim of politics, and as the legal tender for law and order; and, finally, instead of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, wealth as the ideal of the Public School.

The new organization of northern wealth was not comparable to the petty bourgeoisie which seized power after the overthrow of European feudalism. It was a new rule of associated and federated monarchs and finance wielding a vaster and more despotic power than European kings and nobles ever held. It was destined to subdue not only simply Southern agrarianism but even individual wealth and brains in the North which were creating a new petty bourgeoisie of small merchants and skilled artisans.

Conceiv'd out of the fullest heat and pulse of European feudalism -personifying ill unparalleled ways the medieval aristocracy, its towering spirit of ruthless and gigantic caste, with its own peculiar air and arrogance (no mere imitation) -only one of the wolfish earls so plenteous in the plays themselves, or some born descendant and knower, might seem to be the true author of those amazing works -works in some respects greater than anything else ill recorded literature.

Like the preceding phase of feudalism, capitalism was characterized by the concentration in a few hands of ownership of the means of producing wealth and by unequal distribution of the products of human labor. The few who dominated were the bourgeoisie who had originated in the merchants and craftsmen of the feudal epoch, and who rose to be industrialists and financiers.

Thereby, a new set of social relations—that of landlord and serf—replaced the old relations of slavemaster and slave.

Such an institution could only prevail at a time when ordinary means of justice were excluded by the hand of power, and when, in order to bring the guilty to punishment, it required all the influence and authority of such a confederacy. In no other country than one exposed to every species of feudal tyranny, and deprived of every ordinary mode of obtaining justice or redress, could such a system have taken root and flourished.

Hemos dejado atrás el concepto feudalista de que el intelecto es una prerrogativa de clase social, que la inteligencia es una cosa de herencia y del entorno;

Of course, some historians are quite content with the category "feudalism," which they adopt to explain pretty much everything in Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance. We concur with Brunner that this is "a convenient cover for everything that one does not understand about the Middle Ages." 72