"Serf" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... know is a curse to the whole country—when we see even now, how, with a baseness and vileness beyond belief, 'democratic' editors continue to lick the hands which smite them, we do not wonder that the Southerner, taking the doughface for a type of the whole North, characterizes all Yankees as serf-like, servile cap-in-hand crawlers and beggars for patronage. For if we were all of the pro-slavery Democracy, and especially of those who even now continue to yelp for Southern rights and grinningly assure ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... did in Homer's elder time, But we behold them not with Grecian eyes: Then they were types of beauty and of strength, But now of freedom, unconflned and pure, Subject alone to Order's higher law. What cares the Russian serf or Southern slave 50 Though we should speak as man spake never yet Of gleaming Hudson's broad magnificence, Or green Niagara's never-ending roar? Our country hath a gospel of her own To preach and practise before all the world,— ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... become my wife, and that she broke from me with terror and loathing; that I fled her presence, and was once more a wanderer over the earth; that my weary feet dragged me over the snows of Siberia, where the furred noble and the chained serf worked side by side; over the burning sands, where the brown Arab careers along upon his steed, his white burnous fluttering in the hot wind; over the broad prairies of America, where the Indian prowls with his trusty rifle, waiting for the wild beast; over the paths of the trackless deep; ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... their own choice and will. And Maitre Chesnel had known the delights of such high friendship; the Marquis had raised him to his own level. The old noble looked on the good notary as something more than a servant, something less than a child; he was the voluntary liege man of the house, a serf bound to his lord by all the ties of affection. There was no balancing of obligations; the sincere affection on either side put them out of ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... under the Roman Caesars. But the two Lobbies ran themselves as they chose. The real government had become a kind of oligarchy, as it always did after too much false democracy ruined the ideals of real and practical self-rule. A man belonged to his Lobby, just as a serf had belonged ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... to the object only less dear to him than the liberation of Poland: that of the serfs. With time the Polish peasant had sunk to the level of those in neighbouring countries, although the condition of the serf in Poland was never as deplorable as, for instance, that which obtained in Russia. France had only just effected the relief of her lower classes—and this by an orgy of revolt and ferocity. Kosciuszko now came forward ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... is vanished from the stall; No serf is seen in Hassan's hall; The lonely Spider's thin gray pall[dd] 290 Waves slowly widening o'er the wall; The Bat builds in his Haram bower,[74] And in the fortress of his power The Owl usurps the beacon-tower; ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... Pompeii show the devotion of the people to luxurious bathing. The Romans are famous to this day for the magnificence of their lavatories and the universal use of them by the rich and poor alike. In Russia the bath is general, from the Czar to the poorest serf, and through all Finland, Lapland, Sweden and Norway, no hut is so destitute as not to have its family bath. Equally general is the custom in Turkey, Egypt and Persia, among all classes from the Pasha down to the poorest camel driver. Pity it is ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... most concerned, of course, about the working-man and his dinner pail,—whom the Democrats had wantonly thrown out of employment for the sake of a doctrinaire theory. They had put him in competition with the serf of Europe. Such was the subject-matter of my own modest addresses in this, my maiden campaign. I had the sense to see myself in perspective; to recognize that not for me, a dignified and substantial lawyer of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... conceived in the spirit of humour, and its author must be ranked among the great humorists of all time. There is an absurdity about the mission of the chief character, which gives rise to all sorts of ludicrous situations. It takes time for each serf-owner to comprehend Chichikov's object, and he is naturally regarded with suspicion. In one community it is whispered that he is Napoleon, escaped from St. Helena, and travelling in disguise. An old woman with whom he deals has an avaricious cunning worthy of a Norman ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... shrewd brute and cunning brigand has his superior at a disadvantage. Let the South prolong this contest till its military social system acquires sufficient strength, and it will drag us down to its own wretched lord-and-serf level. 'To its level!' rather let us say beneath it; yes, beneath its iron heel, to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... wealth, Helgi and Halfdan looked with disdain upon the son of their father's friend; and when Frithiof asked to have Ingebjorg for his wife, Helgi scornfully answered, "My sister shall not wed the son of a thane. If you like to be our serf, we will make room ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... glades of the Bruttian territory may have been an inheritance rather than a creation of the Romans; but the ruin caused in this district by the Second Punic War, the annexation to the State of large tracts of rebel land,[195] and the reduction of large portions of the population to the miserable serf-like condition of dediticii,[196] must have offered the capitalists opportunities which they could not otherwise have secured; and both here and in Apulia the tendency to extend the grazing system to its utmost limits must have advanced with terrible rapidity since the close ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... smoking made easy," said Harry. "I've heard of a man being another's mouthpiece, and this old gentleman seems to make use of his serf ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... classes are admitted to the benefits of religion. The Sudras and the outcasts are forbidden to read the sacred books, and for any one of the upper classes to teach a serf how to expiate sin ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... stand fire at the present day. The investigation of Paul Vinogradoff and others have conclusively established that there was not a real difference in status between the so-called villein regardant and villein in gross, and that in any case the villein was not properly a slave but rather a serf.[5] Moreover, the Statute of Tenures deals solely with tenure ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... sons might not be educated to anything but agriculture; their daughters could not be married without paying a fine to the master. Worse things than these are told of some, for of course the condition of the serf largely depended on the disposition ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... for at all, since they might be kept overtime, and our departure would thus be delayed, and we be incommoded. Only one of our friends had even taken the trouble to bring a "document;" but the whole party spent three days under the protection of this ex-serf. Of course, we bespoke his attendance for ourselves, and remembered that little circumstance in his "tea-money." This practice of detaining passports arbitrarily, from which the ex-serf was protecting us, prevails in some localities, judging from the uproar ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... grounds. Free now to the poorest serf. Well, there's something century-gained. Some people say the world's growing worse all the ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... dramatic tales, their flux of every human emotion, under the city mask. But however striking these dramatic characters may be to the occasional spectator, they figure merely as an odor, a confusion, to the permanent serf of the Subway.... A long underground station, a catacomb with a cement platform, this was the chief feature of the city vista to the tired girl who waited there each morning. A clean space, but damp, stale, like the corridor to a prison—as indeed it was, since through it each morning Una ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... administration, that led Douglass to urge the enfranchisement of the freedmen. He maintained that in a free country there could be no safe or logical middle ground between the status of freeman and that of serf. There has been much criticism because the negro, it is said, acquired the ballot prematurely. There seemed imperative reasons, besides that of political expediency, for putting the ballot in his hands. Recent events have demonstrated that this necessity ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... and ineffable essence! Oh! I have lived in a land where every mountain, and every stream, and every wood, and every ruin, has its legend and its peculiar spirit; a land in whose dark forests the midnight hunter, with his spirit-shout, scares the slumbers of the trembling serf; a land from whose winding rivers the fair-haired Undine welcomes the belated traveller to her fond and fatal embrace; and you talk to me of omnipotent and ineffable essence! Miserable Mocker! It is not true, Vivian Grey; you are but echoing the world's deceit, and even ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... in the four and a half centuries of modern civilization in the Americas has there existed—in any year, in any decade, in any generation in all that time—a greater spirit of mutual understanding, of common helpfulness, and of devotion to the ideals of serf-government than exists today in the twenty-one American Republics and their neighbor, the Dominion of Canada. This policy of the good neighbor among the Americas is no longer a hope, no longer an objective remaining to be accomplished. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various |
