Let hist’ry tell where rival kings command,

And dubious title shakes the madded land,

When statutes glean the refuse of the sword,

How much more safe the vassal than the lord:

Low sculks the hind beneath the rage of pow’r,

And leaves the wealthy traitor in the Tow’r,

Untouch’d his cottage, and his slumbers sound,

Tho’ confiscation’s vultures hover round.

— Samuel Johnson,
The Vanity of Human Wishes

“It is a great piece of folly to sacrifice the inner for the outer man, to give up the whole or the greater part of one's quiet, leisure and independence for splendor, rank, pomp, titles and honor.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer,
The Wisdom of Life (chapter 2)

“No sooner does a divine gift reveal itself in youth or maid than its market value becomes the decisive consideration, and the poor young creatures are offered for sale, as we might sell angels who had strayed among us.”

— John L. Spalding,
Aphorisms and Reflections (p. 21)

“If a state should pass laws forbidding its citizens to become wise and holy, it would be made a byword for all time. But this, in effect, is what our commercial, social, and political systems do. They compel the sacrifice of mental and moral power to money and dissipation.”

— John L. Spalding,
Aphorisms and Reflections (p. 62)

“Mercenary is whoever thinks less of his work than of the money he receives for doing it; and social conditions which impose tasks that make this inevitable are barbarous.”

— John L. Spalding,
Aphorisms and Reflections (p. 168)

“No pure delight cheers the farmer whose mind is intent on the price he shall get for his crops rather than on the joy there is in tilling them and seeing them grow and ripen: for such an one does not love the land nor his home nor any of the most beautiful and sacred things, but tends to become like the brute that eats and sleeps and dies. His thoughts are with what feeds the animal, and that which nourishes the human is hidden from him.”

— John L. Spalding,
Aphorisms and Reflections (p. 168)

“If between the slaves and slave-owners of today it is difficult to draw as sharp a dividing line as that which separated the former slaves from their masters, and if among the slaves of today there are some who are only temporarily slaves and then become slave-owners, or some who, at one and the same time, are slaves and slave-owners, this blending of the two classes at their points of contact does not upset the fact that the people of our time are divided into slaves and slave-owners as definitely as, in spite of the twilight, each twenty-four hours is divided into day and night.…

The slaves of our times are not all those factory and workshop hands only who must sell themselves completely into the power of the factory and foundry-owners in order to exist, but nearly all the agricultural labourers are slaves, working, as they do, unceasingly to grow another's corn on another's field, and gathering it into another's barn; or tilling their own fields only in order to pay to bankers the interest on debts they cannot get rid of. And slaves also are all the innumerable footmen, cooks, porters, housemaids, coachmen, bathmen, waiters, etc., who all their life long perform duties most unnatural to a human being, and which they themselves dislike.”

— Leo Tolstoy,
The Slavery of Our Times (chapter 8)

“Slavery exists in full vigor, but we do not perceive it, just as in Europe at the end of the Eighteenth Century the slavery of serfdom was not perceived.

People of that day thought that the position of men obliged to till the land for their lords, and to obey them, was a natural, inevitable, economic condition of life, and they did not call it slavery.

It is the same among us: people of our day consider the position of the labourer to be a natural, inevitable economic condition, and they do not call it slavery. And as, at the end of the Eighteenth Century, the people of Europe began little by little to understand that what formerly seemed a natural and inevitable form of economic life -- namely, the position of peasants who were completely in the power of their lords -- was wrong, unjust and immoral, and demanded alteration, so now people today are beginning to understand that the position of hired workmen, and of the working classes in general, which formerly seemed quite right and quite normal, is not what it should be, and demands alteration.”

— Leo Tolstoy,
The Slavery of Our Times (chapter 8)

“Man is a slave in so far as, between action and its effect, between effort and the finished work, there is the interference of alien wills.

This is the case both with the slave and the master today. Never can man deal directly with the conditions of his own action. Society forms a screen between nature and man.”

— Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (XXXV)

“The chattel slave of the past—the wage slave of today; what is the difference? The master selected under chattel slavery his own slaves. Under the wage slavery system the wage slave selects his master.

Formerly the master selected the slave; today the slave selects his master, and he has got to find one or else he is carried down here to my friend, the gaoler and occupies a cell alongside of myself. He is compelled to find one.”

— Albert Parsons,
Statement to the Court (1886)

The proletarian is helpless; left to himself, he cannot live a single day. The bourgeoisie has gained a monopoly of all means of existence in the broadest sense of the word. What the proletarian needs, he can obtain only from this bourgeoisie, which is protected in its monopoly by the power of the state. The proletarian is, therefore, in law and in fact, the slave of the bourgeoisie, which can decree his life or death. It offers him the means of living, but only for an "equivalent", for his work. It even lets him have the appearance of acting from a free choice, of making a contract with free, unconstrained consent, as a responsible agent who has attained his majority.

Fine freedom, where the proletarian has no other choice than that of either accepting the conditions which the bourgeoisie offers him, or of starving, of freezing to death, of sleeping naked among the beasts of the forests! A fine "equivalent" valued at pleasure by the bourgeoisie! And if one proletarian is such a fool as to starve rather than agree to the "equitable" propositions of the bourgeoisie, his "natural superiors",* another is easily found in his place; there are proletarians enough in the world, and not all so insane as to prefer dying to living.

* A favourite expression of the English manufacturers.

— Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (§3)

The only difference as compared with the old, outspoken slavery is this, that the worker of today seems to be free because he is not sold once for all, but piecemeal by the day, the week, the year, and because no one owner sells him to another, but he is forced to sell himself in this way instead, being the slave of no particular person, but of the whole property-holding class. For him the matter is unchanged at bottom, and if this semblance of liberty necessarily gives him some real freedom on the one hand, it entails on the other the disadvantage that no one guarantees him a subsistence, he is in danger of being repudiated at any moment by his master, the bourgeoisie, and left to die of starvation, if the bourgeoisie ceases to have an interest in his employment, his existence.

— Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (§3)

I was sick of this employment arrangement. I had no car, no money, and it was tough seeing others have what I didn’t have even though I was working. I mean the social pressures to have the flyest ride, clothes, and financial mobility started to bear down on me. It’s hard for a person to be without these socially valued possessions and feel like a whole complete human being....

Reading Blood In My Eye, I discovered that capitalist-private property relations are the source of class inequalities, which is the primary factor in my being a member of a class that bears all the burdens of society without enjoying its advantages. Under the influence of illegitimate-capitalist values, I was pursuing the alleviation of social-economic hardship through individual advancement. This is a wholly inadequate remedy to social problems because it doesn’t challenge the fundamental injustice of class-exploitation and class-oppression, which are responsible for creating the socio-economic ills in the first place. Unaware of my class interest, I was perpetuating my own oppression by engaging in competitive capitalist practices that ensure the smooth functioning of the system as the exploiting minority profits in more ways than one off the division and disunity engendered by competition, so prevalent amongst the exploited. Look around: competition, euphemistically called “individuality,” permeates and is systematically promoted to the masses of people while the corporate conglomerations and Fortune 500 are busy “merging and monopolizing.”

— Kevin “Rashid” Johnson,
Defying the Tomb (I. §2)

“It must be acknowledged that our labourer comes out of the process of production other than he entered. In the market he stood as owner of the commodity ‘labour-power’ face to face with other owners of commodities, dealer against dealer. The contract by which he sold to the capitalist his labour-power proved, so to say, in black and white that he disposed of himself freely. The bargain concluded, it is discovered that he was no ‘free agent,’ that the time for which he is free to sell his labour-power is the time for which he is forced to sell it, that in fact the vampire will not lose its hold on him ‘so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited.’”

— Karl Marx, Capital (Vol I) (Ch. 10, §7)

„Nichts ist höher zu schätzen als der Wert des Tages.“

“Nothing should be treasured more highly than the value of the day.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen (Maxims and Reflections)

“The bygone times, when the ‘ruling’ classes, on their slave-hunting raids, threw their victims in chains and forced them to work, of which the rulers had all the benefit — the times when Christian-Germanic robbers stole entire countries, deprived the inhabitants of the soil, and pressed them to feudal service, were indeed terrible enough, but the climax of infamy has been reached by our present ‘law and order’ system, for it defrauded more than nine-tenths of mankind of their means of existence, reduced them to dependence upon an insignificant minority, and condemned them to self-sacrifice. At the same time it has disguised this relation with all sorts of jugglery so that the thralls of today — the wage slaves — but partially recognize their serfdom and outlawed position, they rather incline to ascribe it to the caprices of fortune.”

— Johann Most, The Beast of Property

The serious Folly of wise Men in over-valuing the World, is as contemptible as any thing they think fit to censure.

The first Mistake belonging to Business is the going into it.

Men make it such a Point of Honour to be fit for Business, that they forget to examine whether Business is fit for a Man of Sense.

There is Reason to think the most celebrated Philosophers would have been Bunglers at Business; but the Reason is because they despised it.

It is not a Reproach but a Compliment to Learning, to say, that Great Scholars are less fit for Business; since the truth is, Business is so much a lower thing than Learning, that a Man used to the last cannot easily bring his Stomach down to the first.

Popularity is a Crime from the Moment it is sought; it is only a Virtue where Men have it whether they will or no.

It is stepping very low to get very high.

Men by Habit make irregular Stretches of Power, without discerning the Consequence and Extent of them.

Eagerness is apt to overlook Consequences, it is loth to be stopt in its Career; for when Men are in great haste, they see only in a straight Line.

— George Savile,
Moral Thoughts and Reflections (§2)

If Men considered how many Things there are that Riches cannot buy, they would not be so fond of them.

The Things to be bought with Money, are such as least deserve the giving a Price for them.

Wit and Money are so apt to be abused, that Men generally make a shift to be the worse for them.

Money in a Fool’s Hand exposeth him worse than a pyed Coat.

Money hath too great a Preference given to it by States, as well as by particular Men.

They who are of opinion that Money will do every thing, may very well be suspected to do every thing for Money.

 
— George Savile,
Moral Thoughts and Reflections (§10)

If through your vices you afflicted are,

Lay not the blame of your distress on God;

You made your rulers mighty, gave them guards,

So now you groan 'neath slavery's heavy rod.

— Solon of Athens

“Do not do what you hate, for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven.”

Gospel of Thomas, verse 6

“There is no country in the world so much in need of unpractical people as this country of ours [England]. With us, Thought is degraded by its constant association with practice. Who that moves in the stress and turmoil of actual existence, noisy politician, or brawling social reformer, or poor narrow-minded priest blinded by the sufferings of that unimportant section of the community among whom he has cast his lot, can seriously claim to be able to form a disinterested intellectual judgment about any one thing? Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid. And, harsh though it may sound, I cannot help saying that such people deserve their doom. The sure way of knowing nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful.”

— Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist