I hope this is the appropriate place for this. It's worth reading if you've not read it before.
"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. "
"...the more tyrants pillage, the more they crave, the more they ruin and destroy; the more one yields to them, and obeys them, by that much do they become mightier and more formidable, the readier to annihilate and destroy. But if not one thing is yielded to them, if, without any violence they are simply not obeyed, they become naked and undone and as nothing, just as, when the root receives no nourishment, the branch withers and dies."
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/boetie/etienne/servitude/index.html : Étienne de La Boétie (November 1, 1530 – August 18, 1563) was a French judge, writer, anarchist, and a founder of modern political philosophy in France. He has been best remembered as the great and close friend of the eminent essayist Michel de Montaigne, in one of history's most notable friendships.
