Skip to content
quotesby

About this quote

What does it mean?
Even if you disguise yourself, you remain enslaved, a bitter drink.
In plain terms
Changing your appearance doesn’t free you from oppression; it’s still painful.
What can you take from it?
Surface changes don’t remove underlying oppression.

Where it applies

  • social activism
  • personal transformation

Putting it to work

  • address root causes, not just appearances

Questions to consider

  • What ‘disguises’ do we use to avoid confronting oppression?

Another view

Metaphor may be too vague for concrete action.

More from Laurence Sterne

  1. We get forwards in the world not so much by doing services, as receiving them: you take a withering twig, and put it in the ground; and then you water it, beca…

    Permalink to quote #38
  2. The sad vicissitude of things.

    Permalink to quote #40
  3. God tempers the wind, said Maria, to the shorn lamb.

    Permalink to quote #37

Related quotes

  1. The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things …

    Bertrand RussellBertrand Russell quote #71
  2. That state is a state of Slavery in which a man does what he likes to do in his spare time and in his working time that which is required of him. This state ca…

    Eric GillEric Gill quote #1
  3. I may say this is a deluded generation, veiled with ignorance, that tho popery and slavery be riding in upon them, do not perceive it; tho I am sure there was …

    Richard RumboldRichard Rumbold quote #1