Ludwig Borne Quotes

Raise your eyes and count the small gang of your oppressors who are only strong through the blood they suck from you and through your arms which you lend them unwillingly.

Experience proves that those are oftenest abused who can be abused with the greatest impunity. Men are whipped oftenest who are whipped easiest.

The future condition of the conquered power depends on the will of the conquerer.

Every country we conquer feeds us. And these are just a few of the good things we'll have when this war is over. Slaves working for us everywhere while we sit back with a fork in our hands and a whip on our knees.

People demand freedom only when they have no power.

The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.

One conquered nation is one too many.

We first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate.

The British minister mistakes the Irish character. Had he intended to make Ireland a slave, he should have kept her a beggar. There is no middle policy … greatly emancipate or fundamentally destroy.

All colonies are oppressed peoples.

You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power — he’s free again.

If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.

Once they get their hooks into you, you're a dead pigeon.

You can be a control freak only when you have weak people around you.

The world will not accept dictatorship or domination.

Dracula, if he could see modern corporations, wouldn't like them much. He took care of his people, at least as he saw it. They had very little freedom, but they had a protector.

Without a Prospero-Caliban relationship to balance the Prospero-Ariel one, 'The Tempest' loses much of its resonance.

The only safety for the conquered is to expect no safety.

I think it is the easiest mentality for a human being to be either colonized or to colonize. The structure of either the slave or the master seems to be the simplest and the most relaxing one to slip into. Either you are a slave, and you don't have to think for yourself, or you're a master, and you don't have to work for yourself.

Fear is the passion of slaves.

It the British System is the most gigantic system of slavery the world has yet seen, and therefore it is that freedom gradually disappears from every country over which England is enabled to obtain control.

Peoples will be as before, the sheep sent to the slaughterhouses or to the meadows as it pleases the shepherds.

There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master.

Any society based on domination supports and condones violence.