Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

The Discours sur la servitude volontaire of

ÉTIENNE DE LA BOÉTIE,

1548

Rendered into English by HARRY KURZ

“There are always a few, better endowed than others, who feel the weight of the yoke and cannot restrain themselves from attempting to shake it off: these are the men who never become tamed under subjection and who always, like Ulysses on land and sea constantly seeking the smoke of his chimney, cannot prevent themselves from peering about for their natural privileges and from remembering their ancestors and their former ways. These are in fact the men who, possessed of clear minds and far-sighted spirit, are not satisfied, like the brutish mass, to see only what is at their feet, but rather look about them, behind and before, and even recall the things of the past in order to judge those of the future, and compare both with their present condition. These are the ones who, having good minds of their own, have further trained them by study and learning. Even if liberty had entirely perished from the earth, such men would invent it. For them slavery has no satisfactions, no matter how well disguised.”

The face of Western Human rights

Daughters and Sons of Palestine - The faces of Western Human Rights!
- “Nothing is more certain in modern society than the principle that there are no absolutes, that a name, a phrases, a standard has meaning only when associated with the considerations which give birth to nomenclature. To those who would paralyze our Government in the face of impending threat by encasing it in a semantic strait-jacket, we must reply that all concepts are relative.” -- Justice Vinson, U.S. Supreme Court, 1951 AD

- “It's hard to imagine now, but in 1944, six years after Kristallnacht, Lessing J. Rosenwald, president of the American Council for Judaism, felt comfortable equating the Zionist ideal of Jewish statehood with 'the concept of a racial state -- the Hitlerian concept.'” -- Zionism is the problem, Oped Los Angeles Times March 15, 2009 AD

Hemingbough and St. Francisville, Louisiana