Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

Beware the tyranny of the weak. They just suck you dry.

If you look at slavery across all human history, and you sort of strip away the packaging, whether it's racialized or religious-based, and you look at the actual core of the slavery, it's one person completely controlling another one.

Some people try to get you out of slavery for you to be their slave.

If you will have a person enslaved, the first thing you must do is convince yourself that the person is subhuman. The second thing you have to do is convince your allies so you'll have some help, and the third and probably unkindest cut of all is to convince that person that he or she is subhuman and deserves it.

I don't need handcuffs to enslave a woman.

Harassment is about power---the undue exercise of power by a superior over a subordinate.

Slavery, properly so called, is the establishment of a right which gives to one man such a power over another as renders him absolute master of his life and fortune.

Slavery takes hold of few, but many take hold of slavery.

People can be slave-ships in shoes.

Give a man a free hand and he'll run it all over you.

To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.

They would make fine servants .... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

Powerlessness also corrupts.

I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.

… the tools of despotism and corruption

Would you rather lead an army of slaves?

It has been our experience, that free men are often seduced by sinister practices, enslaved, and transported, which can thus be prevented

The predator wants your silence. It feeds their power, entitlement, and they want it to feed your shame.

People who are in a position of power like to throw their weight around, and that becomes abuse.

I think it's a dangerous thing for anyone to have power over other people.

My definition of slavery is the deprivation of human volition, any form of relationship between two peoples which is based on the deprivation of volition of one side.

We do all like to get things inside a barb-wire corral. Especially our fellow-men. We love to round them up inside the barb-wire enclosure of FREEDOM, and make 'em work. Work, you free jewel, WORK! shouts the liberator, cracking his whip.

Arriane sized her up, tapping one finger against her lips. "Perfect," she said, stepping forward to loop her arm through Luce's. "I was just thinking I could really use a new slave.

Sex, drugs, money, power etc. Just because you get to choose your master doesn't mean you aren't a slave.

Structures can be manipulated for ill as well, especially when people are dealing with issues of power, or control, or violence.