It has always happened that tyrants, in order to strengthen their power, have made every effort to train their people not only in obedience and servility toward themselves, but also in adoration.
Interpretation
The quote illustrates how tyrants manipulate their subjects into obedience and worship.
Etienne De La Boetie highlights the tactics employed by tyrants to consolidate power. They not only enforce obedience but seek to instill a sense of devotion among their people, fostering an environment where the citizens adore their oppressors rather than resist them. This dynamic serves to strengthen the tyrant's control, as blind adoration minimizes dissent and reinforces authority.
In practice
In a speech about government control, one might say, 'As Etienne De La Boetie pointed out, tyrants create a culture of adoration to maintain their regime.'
It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and willingly that one is led to say that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.
We should often feel ashamed of our best actions if the world could see all the motives which produced them.
I'm really very sorry for you all, but it's an unjust world, and virtue is triumphant only in theatrical performances.
The definition of morality: Morality is the idiosyncrasy of decadents having the hidden desire to revenge themselves upon life - and being successful.
It has been the error of the schools to teach astronomy, and all the other sciences, and subjects of natural philosophy, as accomplishments only; whereas they should be taught theologically, or with reference to the Being who is the author of them: for all the principles of science are of divine origin. Man cannot make, or invent, or contrive principles: he can only discover them; and he ought to look through the discovery to the Author.
Man indeed is the most noble, by creation, of all the creatures in the visible World; but by sin he has made himself the most ignoble.
Fame is but an inscription on a grave, and glory the melancholy blazon on a coffin lid.
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