The Empire’s got something worse than whips all right. It’s got obedience. Whips in the soul. They obey anyone who tells them what to do. Freedom just means being told what to do by someone different.
Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.
No sane mortal is truly free, because true freedom is so terrible that only the mad or the divine can face it with open eyes.
Freedom may be mankind’s natural state, but so is sitting in a tree eating your dinner while it is still wriggling.
Freedom did, of course, include man’s age-old right to starve to death.
