[...] But O good Lord! What strange phenomenon is this? What name shall we give to it? What is the
nature of this misfortune? What vice is it, or, rather, what degradation? To see an endless multitude
of people not merely obeying, but driven to servility? Not ruled, but tyrannized over? These wretches
have no wealth, no kin, nor wife nor children, not even life itself that they can call their own. They
suffer plundering, wantonness, cruelty, not from an army, not from a barbarian horde, on account of
whom they must shed their blood and sacrifice their lives, but from a single man; not from a Hercules
nor from a Samson, but from a single little man. Too frequently this same little man is the most
cowardly and effeminate in the nation, a stranger to the powder of battle and hesitant on the sands
of the tournament; not only without energy to direct men by force, but with hardly enough virility to
bed with a common woman! Shall we call subjection to such a leader cowardice? Shall we say that
those who serve him are cowardly and faint-hearted? If two, if three, if four, do not defend
themselves from the one, we might call that circumstance surprising but nevertheless conceivable. In
such a case one might be justified in suspecting a lack of courage. But if a hundred, if a thousand
endure the caprice of a single man, should we not rather say that they lack not the courage but the
desire to rise against him, and that such an attitude indicates indifference rather than cowardice?
When not a hundred, not a thousand men, but a hundred provinces, a thousand cities, a million men,
refuse to assail a single man from whom the kindest treatment received is the infliction of serfdom
and slavery, what shall we call that? Is it cowardice? Of course there is in every vice inevitably some
limit beyond which one cannot go. Two, possibly ten, may fear one; but when a thousand, a million
men, a thousand cities, fail to protect themselves against the domination of one man, this cannot be
called cowardly, for cowardice does not sink to such a depth, any more than valor can be termed the
effort of one individual to scale a fortress, to attack an army, or to conquer a kingdom. What
monstrous vice, then, is this which does not even deserve to be called cowardice, a vice for which no
term can be found vile enough, which nature herself disavows and our tongues refuse to name? [...]
–Étienne de La Boétie's Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)