If you see yourself as a kingly type, then you need your serfs and your army and so on around you.
. . . How can Americans living in the freest country in the world be 'slaves'? We don't even enjoy the liberty of serfs. ( A serf paid only 25% of his earnings to his feudal lord. How much income tax do you pay?) Don't kid yourselves, we're slaves. Slaves with weekends off.
Most Americans aren't the sort of citizens the Founding Fathers expected; they are contented serfs. Far from being active critics of government, they assume that its might makes it right.
Return to Shaoshan I regret the passing, the dying, of the vague dream: my native orchards thirty-two years ago. Yet red banners roused the serfs, who seized three-pronged lances when the warlords raised whips in their black hands. We were brave and sacrifice was easy and we asked the sun, the moon, to alter the sky. Now I see a thousand waves of beans and rice and am happy. In the evening haze heroes are coming home.
Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.
Today the large organization is lord and master, and most of its employees have been desensitized much as were the medieval peasants who never knew they were serfs.
An earthly kingdom cannot exist without inequality of persons. Some must be free, some serfs, some rulers, some subjects.
The crusades made great improvement in the condition of the serfs.
I would rather be tied to the soil as a serf. . . than be king of all these dead and destroyed.
In antiquity slaves were, in all honesty called slaves. In the middle ages, they took the name of serfs. Nowadays they are called wage earners.
