Overseer Quotes & Sayings

Well no administration ever wants an independent overseer, and there are very good career people who are in charge of this investigation, but it could get hairy. — Nina Totenberg

The music stopped. The circle broke. Sometimes a slave will be lost in a brief eddy of liberation. In the sway of a sudden reverie among the furrows or while untangling the mysteries of an early morning dream. In the middle of a song on a warm Sunday night. Then it comes, always - the overseer's cry, the call to work, the shadow of the master, the reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude. — Colson Whitehead

The overseer wouldna speak to me of Ian, but he told me other things that would curl your hair, if it wasna already curled up like sheep's wool." He glanced at me, and a half-smile lit his face, inspite of his obvious perturbation.
"Judging by the state of your hair, Sassenach, I should say that it's going to rain verra soon now. — Diana Gabaldon

25For i you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to j the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls. — Anonymous

Let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world. — Henry David Thoreau

they had not yet been destroyed as Africans completely. Slavery was the curse of their existence; but they had not been robbed yet of that which had been characteristically theirs. They tolerated the baptism and modest garments imposed on them by the French Catholic laws; but in the evenings, they made their cheap fabrics into alluring costumes, made jewelry of animal bones and bits of discarded metal which they polished to look like gold; and the slave cabins of Pointe du Lac were a foreign country, an African coast after dark, in which not even the coldest overseer would want to wander. — Anne Rice

To be clear, male leadership in marriage does not mean the husband does everything or even that he decides everything. Rather, it means he typically initiates and always leads those shared discussions with his wife by which the various aspects of marriage and family life are decided and planned. The wife's opinion is vitally important, and a godly couple should be a close-knit team. But there should be no area of family life in which the husband does not serve as leader, facilitator, and overseer. — Richard D. Phillips

Employers have resorted to requiring a college degree. They do this not for anything the employee may have learned in college but to ensure that he will be able to read and count, and will show up on time. It's a mechanism, that's all. It helps keep the government overseer off their backs, lest they exert a human judgment not approved by their betters. So — Anthony Esolen

There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze that each individual under its weight will end by [internalising] to the point that they are their own overseer, each individual thus exercising surveillance over, and against themself. — Michel Foucault

A true understand of oneself is vital. Writing enables us to act as a sun in our own universe, to become the perfect overseer, and observe the innumerable changes in the seasons of life. Writing is an intense form of self-exploration, and through thoughtful encounters with the humble self, we grow, and that growth diminishes unhappiness and creates joy. — Kilroy J. Oldster

And here is the thing about them men they was Australians they knew full well the terror of the unyielding law the historic memory of UNFAIRNESS were in their blood and a man might be a bank clerk or an overseer he might never have been lagged for nothing but still he knew in his heart what it were to be forced to wear the white hood in prison he knew what it were to be lashed for looking a warder in the eye and even a posh fellow like the Moth had breathed that air so the knowledge of unfairness were deep in his bone and marrow. — Peter Carey

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

He made the earth first and peopled it with dumb creatures, and then He created man to be His overseer on the earth and to hold suzerainty over the earth and the animals on it in His name, not to hold for himself and his descendants inviolable title forever, generation after generation, to the oblongs and squares of the earth, but to hold the earth mutual and intact in the communal anonymity of brotherhood, and all the fee He asked was pity and humility and sufferance and endurance and the sweat of has face for bread. — William Faulkner

I imagined the sound of whips on black backs and the roar of the overseer over the cry of mothers being separated from their babies. I pulled on all the strength I had not to shot out every valuable leaded pane of glass in that stinking house. — Linda Leigh Hargrove

A Florida planter defended his management practices by pointing to his slaves' "natural increase which in the last year has been over ten percent, in a gang of 120." A Georgia overseer informed his employer that with good management his plantation could produce much more cotton. — James Oakes

There never was an overseer on the whole plantation. The oldest colored man always looked after the niggers. We niggers lived better than the niggers on the other plantations. — Norman R. Yetman

The sweat from his dripping brow. But these slaves - look at them! Some are captured Romans, some Sicilians, many black Libyans, but all are in the last exhaustion, their weary eyelids drooped over their eyes, their lips thick with black crusts, and pink with bloody froth, their arms and backs moving mechanically to the hoarse chant of the overseer. Their bodies of all tints from ivory to jet, are stripped to the waist, and every glistening back shows the angry stripes of the warders. But it is not from these that the blood comes which reddens the seats and tints the salt water washing beneath their manacled — Arthur Conan Doyle

If then, we would indeed restore mankind by truly botanic, magnetic, or natural means, let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become of the worthies of the world. — Henry David Thoreau

Rowan swallowed once. Twice. "There was ... there was an uprising at the Calaculla labor camp," he said.
Her heart stumbled on a beat.
"After Princess Nehemia was assassinated, they say a slave girl killed her overseer and sparked an uprising. The slaves seized the camp." He took a shallow breath. "The King of Adarlan sent two legions to get the slaves under control. And they killed them all. — Sarah J. Maas

An overseer called him a traitor, and Rytlock killed him. That's how he became an overseer. Later, a legionnaire called him a deserter, and Rytlock killed him as well. That's how he became a legionnaire. — J. Robert King

Strangely, they seemed to like him, hold him in contempt, and fear him all at the same time. This confused me because I felt just about the same mixture of emotions for him myself. I had thought my feelings were complicated because he and I had such a strange relationship. But then, slavery of any kind fostered strange relationships. Only the overseer drew simple, unconflicting emotions of hatred and fear when he appeared briefly. But then, it was part of the overseer's job to be hated and feared while the master kept his hands clean. — Octavia E. Butler

Well, we all come to it in time - we are broken down to ground-level, and must construct ourselves anew. If we survive, we become stronger: with few exceptions we do not become better. For most of us, when all else has failed, turn to the demon. ("The Overseer") — Albert E. Cowdrey

Human memory awakens and extinguishes at will. It dulls and sharpens actions, enlarges and shrinks those who perform them. It humbles and exalts as it desires. When summoned, it slips away, and when it returns, it will do so at the time and place that suits it. It recognizes no chief, no overseer, no classifier, no ruler. Stories mix and mingle, facts sprout new shoots. The situations and words and scents-oh, the scents!-encrusted there are stored in the most disorganized and wonderful manner, not chronologically, not according to size or importance or even the alphabet. — Meir Shalev

The more routine that systematised activities are, the more nearly they are of the monotonous character seen in the habits of social animals and the less necessary are master builders; the more novel actions are, the more necessary are master builders. Dislike of the leader and the promoter, though linked emotionally to progressivism, is linked logically to total conservatism. Conversely, an authoritarian approach, natural enough in the instigator of new activities, is unjustified in the mere overseer of routines. — Bertrand De Jouvenel

The saying is v trustworthy: If anyone aspires to w the office of overseer, he desires a noble task. 2Therefore x an overseer [1] must be above reproach, y the husband of one wife, [2] z sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, a hospitable, b able to teach, 3not a drunkard, not violent but c gentle, not quarrelsome, d not a lover of money. — Anonymous

Silently, she began to recite the names of her dead. And as the overseer raised his whip, she added her name to the end of that list and swung her ax into his gut. — Sarah J. Maas

In reference to Persepolis and all palaces, cities and temples of the past: could these wonders have come into being without that suffering? without the overseer's whip, the slave's fear, the ruler's vanity? was not the monumentality of past epochs created by that which is negative and evil in man? — Ryszard Kapuscinski

So, Mr. Nick,' murmured the valet, applying shaving soap to his employer's face with an ivory-handled brush, 'are you writing a book?'
Damn him, thought Lerner. He knows I detest conversation with a razor at my throat.
'My memoirs,' he muttered. 'A few jottings only. Waiting to die is such a bore, I write to pass the time.' ("The Overseer") — Albert E. Cowdrey

will appoint Peace as your overseer and Righteousness as your taskmaster. — Anonymous

When you have arrived at your country house and have saluted your household, you should make the rounds of the farm the same day, if possible; if not, then certainly the next day. When you have observed how the field work has progressed, what things have been done, and what remains undone, you should summon your overseer the next day, and should call for a report of what work has been done in good season and why it has not been possible to complete the rest, and what wine and corn and other crops have been gathered. — Cato The Elder

She was tired in her bones, but she rallied her energy one last time and told him of they years in Rifthold, of stealing Asterion horses and racing across the desert, of dancing until dawn with the courtesans and thieves and all the beautiful, wicked creatures in the world. And then she told him about losing Sam, and of that first whipping in Endovier, when she'd spat blood in the Chief Overseer's face, and what she had seen and endured in the following year. She spoke of the day she had snapped and sprinted for her own death. Her heart grew heavy when at last she got to the evening when the Captain of the Royal Guard prowled into her life, and a tyrant's son had offered her a shot at freedom. She told him what she could about the competition and how she'd won it, until her words slurred and her eyelids drooped. — Sarah J. Maas