Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.
Soiés resolus de ne servir plus, et vous voila libres; je ne veux pas que vous le poussies ou l'esbranlies, mais seulement ne le soustenés plus, et vous le verrés comme un grand colosse a qui on a desrobé la base, de son pois mesme fondre en bas et se rompre.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Friday, October 13, 2017
Withdraw Your Support
Étienne de La Boétie (1530-1563), Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (tr. Harry Kurz):