Life & Wisdom Quote by L. Neil Smith

There’s a deliberate jolt in choosing the word “property”: it’s not just about disrespect, it’s about ownership. L. Neil Smith, a libertarian-leaning science fiction writer, loads four blunt words with a whole political theory. “Tired” frames the complaint as long-simmering and personal, the fatigue of someone who’s been forced to negotiate their humanity as if it were a contract term. The line isn’t asking for gentler treatment; it’s rejecting the premise that anyone else has standing to assign your value, your labor, your body, your choices.

The subtext is wider than any single situation. “Considered” matters: the speaker may not literally be owned, but they’re being treated as though they are - by institutions, employers, bureaucracies, family structures, or cultural expectations that quietly turn people into assets. It’s a critique of the way power often hides in polite language: the forms you sign, the rules you “agree” to, the surveillance justified as safety, the moralizing that treats autonomy as a privilege you earn rather than a baseline.

Contextually, Smith’s work sits in a late-20th-century American moment where distrust of the state, fear of creeping control, and the rhetoric of self-ownership were central to a certain strain of politics and sci-fi. The line functions like a miniature manifesto: no ornament, no nuance-smoothing. That bluntness is the point. It forces a binary - person or property - and dares the listener to admit how often modern life still flirts with the second option.