… is from page 80 of Harry Kurz’s 1975 English translation of Etienne de la Boétie’s splendid 1552-1553 tract, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude:
What condition is more wretched than to live thus, with nothing to call one’s own, receiving from someone else one’s sustenance, one’s power to act, one’s body, one’s very life?
Still men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves, or as if anyone could possess under a tyrant a single thing in his own name.
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