Quotes & Sayings About Subservience

The horse must perform from joy, not subservience. Praising a horse frequently with voice, a gentle pat, or relaxing the reins is very important to keep the horse interested and willing. — Klaus Balkenhol

I was willing to pay any price including subservience to secure this love, hoping that with each piece of myself I gave up he would be so pleased that he, too, would be transformed. — Susan Strasberg

My mother raised me to be polite, to be demure. I have long operated under the idea that civility is subservience. But it hasn't gotten me very far, that type of kindness. The world respects people who think they should be running it. — Taylor Jenkins Reid

Grades are a problem. On the most general level, they're an explicit acknowledgment that what you're doing is insufficiently interesting or rewarding for you to do it on your own. Nobody ever gave you a grade for learning how to play, how to ride a bicycle, or how to kiss. One of the best ways to destroy love for any of these activities would be through the use of grades, and the coercion and judgment they represent. Grades are a cudgel to bludgeon the unwilling into doing what they don't want to do, an important instrument in inculcating children into a lifelong subservience to whatever authority happens to be thrust over them. — Derrick Jensen

Naturally torturers giggle while they work: The body's dumb obedience to physics (pull hard enough and this comes off, squeeze tight enough and that pops out) against which the nuances of the victim's personality count for nothing has in it one of the roots of comedy - the spirit's subservience to the flesh. You can cut a head off and shove it in a bag, stick it on a pole, play volleyball or footie with it. Hilarious, among other things. — Glen Duncan

Relax now. That's the beauty of war. Utter subservience to one's leaders absolves a soldier of the consequences of her actions. — Alan Campbell

I am his Highness' dog at Kew;
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you? — Alexander Pope

Chuchill has renounced all British interests in Europe and those of his people who are not blind now realise that the pretext for this war was far removed from the cause of it, namely, the subservience of the so-called democratic politicians to their Jewish masters. — William Joyce

Father says we are all Defects, in our way. Humans and clones. He says the word is really just a scare tactic to incite disobedient beings into subservience. He says that's all it really is - just a word. — Rachel Cohn

Subservience is degrading, even if you like it. — Marty Rubin

Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books. — Etienne De La Boetie

Cult (totalistic type): a group or movement exhibiting a great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea, or thing and employing unethically manipulative techniques of persuasion and control (e.g., isolation from former friends and family, debilitation, use of special methods to heighten suggestibility and subservience, powerful group pressure, information management, suspension of individuality or critical judgement, promotion of total dependency on the group and fear of leaving it, etc) designed to advance the goals of the group's leaders, to the actual or possible detriment of members, their families, or the community. — Louis Jolyon West

The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. In the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience. — Henry Steele Commager

Churchill admired the division of powers in the American government, but he thought they were copied from much older British practices. In 1950 he said: [T]he division of ruling power has always been for more than 500 years the aim of the British people. The division of power is the keynote of our parliamentary system and of the constitutions we have spread all over the world. The idea of checks and counter checks; the resistance to the theory that one man, or group of men, can by sweeping gestures and decisions reduce all the rest of us to subservience; these have always been the war cries of the British nation and the division of power has always been one of the war cries of the British people. And from here the principle was carried to America. The scheme of the American Constitution was framed to prevent any one man or any one lot, getting arbitrary control of the whole nation. — Larry P Arnn

If you are black, the only roads into the mainland of American life are through subservience, cowardice, and loss of manhood. These are the white man's roads. — Amiri Baraka

The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure. — Hermann Hesse

Those which defend liberty, equality and fraternity, seem to us superior to those which accept tyranny, the subservience of women, social and ethnic hatred. — Claude Gueant

But the reality is that women today do not think of themselves in the context of helping "their man." Women today have been brainwashed into thinking that efforts in that direction are in the category of oppression, subservience, and catering to frail male egos. It is sad that this is the prevalent point of view, because interdependence is what ultimately feeds both the man and the woman what they truly need to be happy. — Laura C. Schlessinger

And was disposed too often to idealize as a virtue that habit of mean subservience to wealth and social position which, after more than half a century of political democracy, is still the characteristic and odious vice of the Englishman. — R. H. Tawney

What kind of weirdo makes cheese? It's too hard to imagine, too homespun, too something. We're so alienated from the creation of even ordinary things we eat or use, each one seems to need its own public relations team to calm the American subservience to hurry and bring us back around to doing a thing ourselves, at home. — Barbara Kingsolver

Your subservience makes me uncomfortable."
That pissed me off. "Then you shouldn't pay people to do things for you. End of story. — Erin McCarthy

Oppenheimer was lamenting the subservience of science to innate human cruelty in an address to the American Philosophical Society: "We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon, that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world ... a thing that by all the standards of the world we grew up in is an evil thing. And by so doing ... we have raised again the question of whether science is good for man." This public admission of personal despair at the moral collapse of the modern world's leading intellectual enterprise could not be more nakedly penitent. — Algis Valiunas

We have indeed left an impressive example of subservience. Just as Rome of old explored the limits of freedom, so have we plumbed the depths of slavery, robbed by informers even of the interchange of speech. We would have lost our memories as well as our tongues had it been as easy to forget as to be silent. — Tacitus

Thomas Jefferson, the leading Enlightenment figure in the United States, along with Benjamin Franklin, who took exactly the same view, argued that dependence will lead to "subservience and venality", and will "suffocate[s] the germs of virtue". And remember, by dependence he meant wage labor, which was considered an abomination under classical liberal principles. — Noam Chomsky

But those are lies!" Imweshi turned with a frigid smile. "Of course they are! But who cares? Does it matter to them?" She gestured toward the window. "Who are they going to believe? Us? We well-fed, clean, healthy, wealthy, coach-riding Kyn? Perhaps you with all your savage finery can convince them that the mechanical beasts that draw this carriage are something other than dark sorcery. What will you say to them, my truth-telling Wielder? Will your truth feed them, clothe them, give them warm homes? What would they rather hear: that Lojar Vald and his kind have driven them halfway into their graves out of greed and selfish ambition, that the promises of another life are mere manipulations to ensure their subservience, or that a small group of backward barbarians are the only thing between them and their salvation? If you stood in their place, who would you believe?" The carriage crested a hill and left the foundries and the empty-eyed Humans behind. Tarsa — Daniel Heath Justice

For my own part, I had rather suffer any inconvenience from having to work occasionally in chambers and kitchen ... than witness the subservience in which the menial class is held in Europe. — Harriet Martineau

Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. — Thomas Jefferson

In the case of a man and a woman [accused of commiting a crime together], both will often agree to the man taking the rap despite the man being more likely to receive a longer sentence and more likely to be raped in prison. If blacks were agreeing to do that for whites, the black community would be smart enough to call that 'learned subservience. — Warren Farrell

The genius of the Reformation lay in the fact that human beings were made free under God. Justification "by faith alone" cut away the bureaucratic jungle of human authorities and subservience. But where this liberty was not balanced by responsibility, the Reformation made human beings so free under God that it was only a short step to their being free from God. We might say that the despair of existentialism is simply the logic of atheism, but this is true only insofar as atheism itself is the logic of ungrateful Protestantism. — Os Guinness

If women are the earliest sources of emotional caring and physical nurture for both female and male children, it would seem logical, from a feminist perspective at least, to pose the following questions: whether the search for love and tenderness in both sexes does not originally lead toward women; why in fact women would ever redirect that search; why species-survival, the means of impregnation, and emotional/erotic relationships should ever have become so rigidly identified with each other; and why such violent strictures should be found necessary to enforce women's total emotional, erotic loyalty and subservience to men. — Adrienne Rich

[The public school system is] usually a twelve year sentence of mind control.
Crushing creativity, smashing individualism, encouraging collectivism and
compromise, destroying the exercise of intellectual inquiry, twisting it
instead into meek subservience to authority. — Walter Karp

In this way all violent bonds and orders are cancelled as if the freedom of the primal world had been restored with one blow. Man, too, is made open and true by this freedom. Wine, as Plutarch says so nicely, frees the soul of subservience, fear, and insincerity; it teaches men how to be truthful and candid with one another. It reveals that which was hidden. Wine and truth have long been associated in proverbs. It is a good thing, so it is said, to search for the truth in earnest conversation while one drinks wine, and agreements arrived at over a wine glass were at one time considered to be the most sacred and inviolable agreements. — Walter F. Otto

Economic analysis is the first principle of Marxism. Professors who were genuine leftists would have challenged the entire economics-driven machinery of American academe the wasteful multidepartmental structure, the divisive pedantry of overspecialization, the cronyism and sycophancy in recruitment and promotion, the boondoggling ostentation of pointless conferences, the exploitation of graduate students and part-time teachers, the subservience of faculty to overpaid administrators, the mediocrity and folly of the ruling cliques of the Modern Language Association. — Camille Paglia

Being passive doesn't mean being subservient. Her power lay in how well she chose to respond. There was no subservience involved. — Victoria Hislop

The God of the Bible is the God of liberation rather than oppression; a God of justice rather than injustice; a God of freedom and humanity rather than enslavement and subservience; a God of love, righteousness and community rather than hatred, self-interest and exploitation. — Allan Boesak

Subservience of any kind is death to the spirit. — Alice Walker

We need worship for our spirit, fellowship for our soul and committed subservience for our body. — Larry Norman

Laugh at tyrants and the tragedy they inflict. Such men welcome our tears as evidence of subservience, but our laughter condemns them to ignominy. — Dean Koontz

Intellectuals ... advertise their superiority to political practice but are absolutely in its thrall ... It is no accident that Marxist theory and practice use the intellectuals as tools and keep them in brutal subservience. — Allan Bloom

The value of a work of art cannot ultimately turn on the more or less of its subservience to ideology; for painting can be grandly subservient to the half-truths of the moment, doggedly servile, and yet be no less intense. — T.J. Clark

Every entrepreneur and every owner of means of production must daily justify his social function through subservience to the wants of the consumers. The management of a socialist economy is not under the necessity of adjusting itself to the operation of a market. It has an absolute monopoly. It does not depend on the wants of the consumers. It itself decides what must be done. It does not serve the consumers as the businessman does. It provides for them as the father provides for his children or the headmaster of a school for the students. It is the authority bestowing favors, not a businessman eager to attract customers. — Ludwig Von Mises

The West's main weakness remains unchanged: it cannot grasp the fact that it is facing an acceleration in the unfolding of Soviet convergence strategy which is intended to procure the subservience of the West to Moscow under an ultimate Communist World Government. — Anatoliy Golitsyn

None of it could be reduced to something as simple as invader and invaded. Baru saw in the city what she felt in herself. The two-faced allegiances, the fearful monitoring of self and surroundings, the whimpering need to please somehow kneeling alongside marrow-deep defiance. One eye set on a future of glittering wealthy subservience, the other turned to a receding and irretrievable freedom. The liquor of empire, alluring and corrosive at once, saturating everything, every old division of sex and race and history, remaking it all with the promise and the threat of power. — Seth Dickinson

Is the Labour Party to remain a democratic party in which the right of free criticism and free debate is not merely tolerated but encouraged? Or are the rank and file of the party to be bludgeoned or cowed into an uncritical subservience towards the leadership? — Michael Foot

They seem to have moved from total opposition to total subservience. — John Major

Christ, for Nietzsche as for Tolstoy, is not a rebel. The essence of His doctrine is
summed up in total consent and in nonresistance to evil. Thou shalt not kill, even to prevent killing. The
world must be accepted as it is, nothing must be added to its unhappiness, but you must consent to suffer
personally from the evil it contains. The kingdom of heaven is within our immediate reach. It is only an
inner inclination which allows us to make our actions coincide with these principles and which can give
us immediate salvation. Not faith but deeds - that, according to Nietzsche, is Christ's message. From then
on, the history of Christianity is nothing but a long betrayal of
this message. The New Testament is already corrupted, and from the time of Paul to the Councils,
subservience to faith leads to the neglect of deeds. — Albert Camus

Then, are you master of us all? You didn't teach her that. Was she supposed to imbibe it from my quiet subservience? — Anne Rice

Dependence leads to subservience. — Thomas Jefferson

Power is sexy, not simply in its own right, but because it inspires self-confidence in its owner and a shiver of subservience on the part of those who approach it. — Barbara Amiel

His head is a little below mine, so that when he looks up at me it's at a juvenile angle. It must amuse him, this fake subservience.
(...)
The problem wasn't only the women, he says. The main problem was with the men. There was nothing for them any more.
(...)
That was part of it, the sex was too easy. Anyone could just buy it. There was nothing to work for, nothing to fight for.
(...) — Margaret Atwood

It would not do to be Lord of a universe inhabited solely by serfs. — Wayne Gerard Trotman

From sandwich to summer school, they were the symbols of subservience and the enemies of freedom. — J.G. Ballard

Politeness [is] a sign of dignity, not subservience. — Theodore Roosevelt

Since early childhood, their emotions have been conditioned by the tribal premise that one must "belong," one must be "in," one must swim with the "mainstream," one must follow the lead of "those who know." A man's frustrated mind adds another emotion to the tribal conditioning: a blindly bitter resentment of his own intellectual subservience. Modern men are gregarious and antisocial at the same time. They have no inkling of what constitutes a rational human association. — Ayn Rand

This basic problem of relevance-cum-subservience has been given an added twist in the modern world, where relevance has become not only hollow but fragile and short-lived. A wider range of choices, a deeper uncertainty of events, a more pressing need for new styles - all this makes for an accelerating turnover of issues, concerns and fads. Nothing tires like a trend or ages faster than a fashion. Today's bold headline is tomorrow's yellowing newsprint. Thus the relevance-hungry liberals achieve relevance, but their victory is Pyrrhic. It is precisely as they win that they lose. As they become relevant to one group or movement, they become irrelevant to another and find themselves rudely dismissed. Far from being in the avant-garde, Christian liberals trot smartly behind the times. Far from being genuinely new or radical, they catch up and announce their discoveries breathlessly, only to see the vanguard disappearing down the road on the trail of a different pursuit. — Os Guinness

Lilliputians think nothing can be more unjust, than for people, in subservience to their own appetites, to bring children into the world, and leave the burthen of supporting them on the public. As — Jonathan Swift