Max Beckmann Quotes

If you see anybody wail and complain, call him a slave, though he be clad in purple.

The world will not accept dictatorship or domination.

Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.

If you turn the other cheek, you can be enslaved for 1,000 years.

People demand freedom only when they have no power.

Master of the universe but not of myself, I am the only rebel against my absolute power.

No man is good enough to be another's master.

War is the second worst activity of mankind, the worst being acquiescence in slavery.

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.

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

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.

A thousand men enslaved fear one beast free.

We are a free people; and now you have planted in our country the title deeds of our future slavery. You are neither god nor demon; who are you, then, to make slaves? Orou! You understand the language of these men, tell us all, as you have told me, what they have written on this sheet of metal: This country is ours. This country yours? And why? Because you have walked thereon? If a Tahitian landed one day on your shores, and scratched on one of your rocks or on the bark of your trees: This country belongs to the people of Tahiti - what would you think?

We were not designed to be dominated.

There are a few men whom slavery holds fast, but there are many more who hold fast to slavery.

If you are not their slaves, you are rebels.

It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are yourself the slave-driver.

To change masters is not to be free.

Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.

Virtue cannot dwell with slaves, nor reign O'er those who cower to take a tyrant's yoke.

My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things.

Not by the forces of civil war can you govern the very weakest woman. You can kill that woman, but she escapes you then; you cannot govern her. No power on earth can govern a human being, however feeble, who withholds his or her consent.

It's sort of what the Johnny and Devi stories are about, the idea of always being a slave to something.

I'm not a big crier.

Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master.