Freebooter, n. A conqueror in a small way of business, whose annexations lack of the sanctifying merit of magnitude.
Ambrose Bierce
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The Conqueror, whose core issue is safety splits us into Conqueror and Enemy/Victim, tells us, "Don't trust!" and generates fear, paranoia, distortions of reality, and the need to annihilate enemies. The Conqueror seduces us by making us feel special, sometimes grandiose and self-righteous, sometimes especially weak and victimized.
Starhawk
If merit is not recognised, still it is merit, and it ought to be honoured as such; but if it is rewarded, it becomes valuable in the eyes of all, and everybody is encouraged to pursue that course in which merit obtains its due reward.
Keshub Chunder Sen
Mere bashfulness without merit is awkward; and merit without modesty, insolent. But modest merit has a double claim to acceptance, and generally meets with as many patrons as beholders.
Joseph Addison
You as a Fascist stand for the small trader against the chain-store; for the peasant against the usurer; for the nation, great or small, against the super-state; for personal business against Big Business; for the craftsman against the Machine; for the creator against the middleman; for all that prospers by individual effort and creative toil, against all that prospers in the abstract air of High Finance or of the theoretic ballyhoo of Internationalism.
Wyndham Lewis
[Stendhal] was small, ugly and obsessed by physical beauty in others, and he spent most of his time in salons and opera houses, pursuing aristocratic hostesses and singers. After the fall of Napoleon, he retired to Italy, adopted his pseudonym and began to write. He was a sexual freebooter who “found a notion of obtaining happiness from a virtuous woman wholly inconceivable”. At 59, unmarried, syphilitic and obscure, he dropped dead in a Paris street.
Anthony Burgess
Bierce, Ambrose
Big L (rapper)
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