Drazen

“Do not imagine that there is any bird more easily caught by decoy, nor any fish sooner fixed on the hook by wormy bait, than are all of these poor fools neatly tricked into servitude by the slightest feather passed before their mouths.”
― Étienne de La Boétie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude

“For the fear of death is indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being a pretense of knowing the unknown; and no one knows whether death, which men in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good. Is not this ignorance of a disgraceful sort, the ignorance which is the conceit that a man knows what he does not know? And in this respect only I believe myself to differ from men in general, and may perhaps claim to be wiser than they are:—that whereas I know but little of the world below, I do not suppose that I know: but I do know that injustice and disobedience to a better, whether God or man, is evil and dishonorable, and I will never fear or avoid a possible good rather than a certain evil.”
― Plato, The Trial and Death of Socrates

“Because a freeman ought not to be a slave in the acquisition of knowledge of any kind. Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.”
― Plato, The Republic of Plato

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? - Who will watch the watchers?”
― Juvenal, The Sixteen Satires