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The fundamental political question is why do people obey a government. The answer is that they tend to enslave themselves, to let themselves be governed by tyrants. Freedom from servitude comes not from violent action, but from the refusal to serve. Tyrants fall when the people withdraw their support.

— Étienne de La Boétie Disputed

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Source, in full

This quote is a paraphrase of the contents of the first chapter of Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. The quote appears in an edition titled Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude edited by Murray Rothbard and Harry Kurz (1975), p. 39

More quotes by Étienne de La Boétie

Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves.

Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)

The good seed that nature plants in us is so slight and so slippery that it cannot withstand the least harm from wrong nourishment.

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Friendship ... receives its real sustenance from an equality that, to proceed without a limp, must have its two limbs equal.

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Friendship ... flourishes not so much by kindnesses as by sincerity.

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The mob has always behaved in this way—eagerly open to bribes that cannot be honorably accepted, and dissolutely callous to degradation and insult that cannot be honorably endured.

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Étienne de La Boétie (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.