Slavish Quotes

#1. One of the extraordinary features of the Blair government has been its slavish support for the central tenets of Bush's foreign policy - above all, the war in Iraq. During the Cold War, the Wilson government resisted the suggestion that it should send troops to Vietnam.

Martin Jacques

#2. If men make war in slavish obedience to rules, they will fail.

Ulysses S. Grant

#3. Common sense will nearly always stand you in better stead than a slavish adherence to the conventions.

M.M. Kaye

#4. How I snuffed that Tartar air!
how I spurned that turnpike earth!
that common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records.

Herman Melville

#5. I fear yet this iron yoke of outward conformity hath left a slavish print upon our necks: the ghost of a linnen decency yet haunts us.

John Milton

#6. Long time men lay oppress'd with slavish fear Religion's tyranny did domineer ... At length a mighty one of Greece began To assert the natural liberty of man, By senseless terrors and vain fancies let To slavery. Straight the conquered phantoms fled.

Lucretius

#7. She claimed she loved the camera, its warmth, its familiarity. She responded to its naked glare, its slavish attention to every expression of her face and body, with the kind of immediacy a trusted lover could expect.

Anne Edwards

#8. I can learn from the preachers of the past, and should; but I must not be a slavish imitator of them.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

#9. O slavish man! will you not bear with your own brother, who has God for his Father, as being a son from the same stock, and of the same high descent? But if you chance to be placed in some superior station, will you presently set yourself up for a tyrant?

Epictetus

#10. Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.

Herman Melville

#11. Method involves a slavish addiction to laws, and we can only aspire to anarchy.

Robert Pinsky

#12. Subordination to morality can be slavish or vain or self- interested or resigned or gloomily enthusiastic or thoughtless or an act of despair, just as subordination to a prince can be: in itself it is nothing moral.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#13. A slavish bondage to parents cramps every faculty of the mind.

Mary Shelley

#14. Let us therefore animate and encourage each other, and show the whole world that a Freeman, contending for liberty on his own ground, is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth.

George Washington

#15. If men make war in slavish observance of rules, they will fail. No rules will apply to conditions of war as different as those which exist in Europe and America ... War is progressive, because all the instruments and elements of war are progressive.

Ulysses S. Grant

#16. We imitate each other with slavish devotion and our most strenuous efforts are put forth to try to say the same thing that everyone around us is saying - and yet to find an excuse for saying it, some little safe variation on the approved theme or, if no more, at least a new illustration.

A.W. Tozer

#17. That is truth, Kobbi, unpleasant thought though it be. We do not wish to go on year after year living slavish lives. Working, working, working! Getting nowhere.

George S. Clason

#18. I'm taking Fleur on a thestral," said Bill. "She's not that fond of brooms."
Fleur walked over to stand beside him, giving him a sloppy, slavish look that Harry hoped with all his heart would never appear on his face again.

J.K. Rowling

#19. When she went out to the kitchen, I knew she would be getting her Triscuits. That was what she had for her snack at the end of every workday: six Triscuits exactly, because six was the "serving size" listed on the box. She showed a slavish devotion to the concept of a recommended serving size ...

Anne Tyler

#20. People who are slavish to a fantasy ideology become very lonely in the world. It's very alienating and sometimes reality is very threatening to this magical way of thinking. On the other hand, if it is a politician or leader that chooses for whatever reason to remain

Mark Ruffalo

#21. My dog has the intellectual capacity of a lime wedge, yet even he possesses an elaborate set of assumptions, based on his ability to control my behavior through a combination of slavish devotion and incessant howling.

Martha Beck

#22. Slavish fear brings not back the backslider to God, but the sweet wooings of love allure him to Jesus' bosom.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#23. She needed someone to worship; he needed slavish devotion. They became inseparable companions.

Laura Joh Rowland

#24. Our wisdom is slavish prejudice, our customs consist in control,
constraint, compulsion. Civilised man is born and dies a slave.
The infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the corpse is nailed
down in his coffin. All his life long man is imprisoned by our
institutions.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#25. O imitators, you slavish herd!

Horace

#26. And in that city Ferrante's rise began, at the outer edge of the Spanish court, where he learned that the virtue of sovereigns is their caprice, and Power is an insatiable monster, to be served with slavish devotion in order to snatch every crumb falling from that table.

Umberto Eco

#27. I think it is worse to be poor in mind than in purse, to be stunted and belittled in soul, made a coward, made a liar, made mean and slavish, accustomed to fawn and prevaricate, and "manage" by base arts a husband or a father,
I think this is worse than to be kicked with hobnailed shoes.

Frances Power Cobbe

#28. The absurd duty, too often inculcated, of obeying a parent only on account of his being a parent, shackles the mind, and prepares it for a slavish submission to any power but reason.

Mary Wollstonecraft

#29. The mind of the man who receives gifts is acted on by the mind of the giver, so the receiver is likely to become degenerated. Receiving gifts is prone to destroy the independence of the mind, and make us slavish. Therefore, receive no gifts.

Swami Vivekananda

#30. Would men but generously snap our chains, and be content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience, they would find us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers - in a word, better citizens

Mary Wollstonecraft

#31. I showed him how the gospel frees us from this obsessive pressure to perform, this slavish demand to "become." I showed him how the gospel declares that in Christ "we already are.

Tullian Tchividjian

#32. It is not only a troublesome but slavish to be nice [fastidious].

William Penn

#33. There is a fear of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom, which is founded in love. There is also a slavish fear, which is a mere dread of evil, and is purely selfish.

Charles Grandison Finney

#34. I don't know how anyone can appreciate devotion that slavish. It's not objective. I have a similar issue with religion.

Max Barry

#35. The megalopsychos cannot let anyone else, except a friend, determine his life. For that would be slavish; and this is why all flatterers are servile and inferior people are flatterers.

Aristotle.

#36. I welcomed my slavish existence as a surgical resident, the never-ending work, the cries that kept me in the present, the immersion in blood, pus, and tears
the fluids in which one dissolved all traces of self. In working myself ragged, I felt integrated ...

Abraham Verghese

#37. The mass of mankind are evidently slavish in their tastes, preferring a life suitable to beasts.

Aristotle.

#38. Imitators are a slavish herd and fools in my opinion.
[Fr., C'est un betail servile et sot a mon avis
Que les imitateurs.]

Jean De La Fontaine

#39. Every Tory is a coward; for servile, slavish, self-interested fear is the foundation of Toryism; and a man under such influence, though he may be cruel, never can be brave.

Thomas Paine

#40. The master never counseled slavish belief. 'Words are only shells,' he said. 'Win conviction of God's presence through your own joyous contact in meditation.' "No

Paramahansa Yogananda

#41. God loves us too much to leave us in the hell of unhappiness that comes from trying to do his job. Into the slavish misery of our ladder-defined lives, God condescends.

Tullian Tchividjian

#42. Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints
the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk
we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

Harry Mathews

#43. Happy he who far from business persuits
Tills and re-tills his ancestral lands
With oxen of his own breeding
Having no slavish yoke about his neck.

Horace

#44. By the time of the '90s boom, CEOs had become superheroes, accorded celebrity treatment and followed with a kind of slavish scrutiny that Alfred P. Sloan could never have imagined.

James Surowiecki

#45. There are slavish souls who carry their appreciation for favors done them so far that they strangle themselves with the rope of gratitude.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#46. She appreciated the fact that the wolf did not caper, bow down, yelp, or slaver on her, in the slavish and inconsiderate way of dogs. The wolf was no whore for man's approval. He fed himself.

Patrick Califia-Rice

#47. I'm a historian, I think history matters, but we don't have to be slavish in following it and restoring it,

Jack Granatstein

#48. I feel ashamed that the new, nuclear, neo-liberal India thinks of itself as a 'natural ally' of Israel. Ever since India began to call itself an emerging superpower, it has become a slavish, groveling satellite state of the US.

Arundhati Roy

#49. A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect. Be gone, odious wasp! You smell of decayed syllables.

Norton Juster

#50. I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.

John Adams

#51. Herein lies a riddle: How can a people so gifted by God become so seduced by naked power, so greedy for money, so addicted to violence, so slavish before mediocre and treacherous leadership, so paranoid, deluded, lunatic?

Philip Berrigan

#52. Peace secured by slavish submission is not peace.

Kim Il-sung

#53. It is precisely our plasticity, our long childhood, that prevents a slavish adherence to genetically programmed behavior in human beings more than in any other species.

Carl Sagan

#54. The newspaper has debauched the American until he is a slavish, simpering, and angerless citizen; it has taught him to be a lump mass-man toward fraud, simony, murder, and lunacies more vile than those of Commodus or Caracalla.

Edward Dahlberg

#55. Call it no more free-will, but slavish lust; free to evil, but free from good, till regenerating grace loosens the bands of wickedness.

Thomas Boston

#56. Some lawyers and judges may have forgotten it, but the purpose of the court system is to produce justice, not slavish obedience to the law.

Charley Reese