Nature of the
Gorean Master

Nothing fulfills maleness like Mastery. He who would be a man, must be a Master. He who surrenders his Mastery, surrenders his manhood.
book 20 page 176

The Gorean Master is a strong Man, strong willed, strong in His physical features and a demanding Man as well, but by nature They are fair and kind, not cruel. Although They will tolerate no disrespect to Them or Their honor by slave or Free Person.

Perhaps it should only be added that the Gorean master, though often strict, is seldom cruel. The girl knows , if she pleases him, her lot will be an easy one. She will almost never encounter sadism or wanton cruelty, for the psychological environment that tends to breed these diseases is largely absent on Gor. this does not mean that she will not expect to be beaten if she disobeys, or fails to please her Master.
Outlaws of Gor pg. 53

He is extremely loyal to His Homestone (The place where He resides/or came from and pledges His loyality to)

"...one who speaks of Home Stones should stand, for matters of honor are here involved, and honor is respected in the barbaric codes of Gor."
Tarnsman of Gor .. pg 27

To a Gorean Master, honor is very valued and prized. Honor once lost can only be regained if ever through rigorous trial or long term atonement. A Gorean Warrior will go to extremes to fullfill every promise, vow and letter of His code of honor, even though none may be around to see it's fullfilled He does so anyhow, He is considered a Man of honor and highly respected yet a very passionate and emotional Man as well.

"I understand," I said. I had a respect for caste honor. Honor is honor, in small things as well as great. Indeed, how can one practice honor in great things, if not in small things?
Rogue of Gor  page 231

"Tears are not unbecoming to the soldier," said Callimachus. "The soldier is a man of deep passions, and emotion. Many men cannot even understand his depths. Do not fear your currents and your powers. In the soldier are flowers and storms. Each is a part of him, and each is real. Accept both. Deny neither."
Guardsman of Gor   page 238

A Master with honor will be respected even by His enemies. He will defend His personal code of honor at all costs, even to the death. Respect is commonly shown to A/all by a Gorean Master, respect for other Free Persons because of Their honor and pride and respect for the kajira, a Master may control and own a kajira but that does not mean He don't value the kajira's station in life and respect that they are true slaves and completely submitted to their slavery.

He is a extremely proud Man, He takes pride in not only His honor as well as His caste but also His property as well, slaves included. slaves are a prized piece of property molded to His desires and wants. He sometimes might seem swayed or softened by them but when He tires of the games He immediately puts a stop to it and takes what He desires of His slaves. His control over His property, His slaves is unyielding and in that unyielding control (Mastery) a slave thus finds a freedom she would not otherwise find. Under His control and Mastery He allows her to be more feminine and erotic then she has ever would experience otherwise. He demands her feminity and will accept no compromise to it.

The Gorean man will accept no compromise on your femininity, not from a slave. She will be what he wishes, and that is a woman, fully, and his. If necessary you will be whipped or starved. You may fight your master. He will, if he wishes, permit this, to prolong the sport of your conquest, but in the end, it is you who are the slave; it is you who will lose. On Earth you had the society at your back, the result of centuries of feminization; he could not so much as speak harshly to you but you could rush away or summon magistrates; here, however, society is not at your back, but at his; it will abet him in his wishes, for you are only a slave; you will have no one to call, nowhere to run; you will be alone with him, and at his mercy. Further, he has not been conditioned with counterinstinctual value sets, programmed with guilt, taught self-hatred; he has been taught pride and has, in the very air he breathes, imbibed the mastery of females. These are different men. They are not Earthlings. They are Goreans. They are strong, and they are hard, and they will conquer you. For a man of Earth, you might never be a woman. For a man of Gor, I assure you, my dear, sooner or later you will be."
Tribesman of Gor page 12

Goreans tend to also be very proud of their castes and spends little time envying one in another caste, this is known as "caste pride".   Work within a caste is not mere work, it's a way of life that they consider art, symbolic of them and who they are.  The caste structure is almost like a clan kinship, one respective caste will span all of gor giving a kinship to members within it, completely different from the bond of ones homestone where one dedicates himself to one given city. (for more on castes)

Goreans have a deep admiration for their world and all it consists of, right down to the animals and plants, they understand each living creature has it's place and they respect this, even a Woodcutter will tell the tree why it must be cut before cutting it, the Warrior has deep respect for the mighty and powerful creatures that He might hunt as the larl and sleen.

Goreans care for their world. They love the sky, the plains, the sea, the rain in the summer, the snow in the winter. They will sometimes stand and watch clouds. The movement of grass in the wind is very beautiful to them. More than one Gorean poet has sung of the leaf of a Tur tree. I have known warriors who cared for the beauty of small flowers.
Hunters of Gor  page 119

More on honor can be found at HONOR

and more about Warrior's codes at WARRIOR'S CODE

More Quotes of interest

We met in the centre of the room and embraced. I wept, and he did, too, without shame. I learned later that on this alien world a strong man may feel and express emotions, and that the hypocrisy of constraint  is not honored on this planet as it is on mine.
Tarnsman of Gor page 21

According to the Gorean way of thinking pity humiliates both he who pities and he who is pitied.  According to the Gorean way, one may love but one may not pity
Outlaw of Gor  page 31

Most goreans, like most men on Earth are right handed. This is natural, as almost all Goreans seem to be derived from humans stock. In Gorean, as in certain English
languages, the same word is used for both stranger and enemy.
Explorers of Gor  pg. 282

Why are the men of Gor different from those of Earth? Is it that it is only a matter of chance, that on Earth and not Gor due to a chance dynamic or a particular situation, the consequences of which were not understood, civilization developed not as the expression, celebration and enhancement of nnature, constituting a palace within which nature might thrive, but as its nemesis, its stunting foe? I do not know. Perhaps those they call Priest-Kings, if they exist, have been thoughtful in this respect. Or perhaps it is simply that the men of Gor, unlike the men of Earth, do not choose to unman themselves. why should we do so, they might ask. And there is, I think, no answer to that question, The men of Gor, like beasts and loving gods, subject the women they own to their total mastery. It pleases them to do so. They are men. Should I be distressed, or displeased? Not truly, for I am a woman. I admire their honesty, that they scorn to conceal the sovereignty which is theirs by nature. They do not play games. They put me to their feet, where I belong. Should I be displeased? No, for I am a woman. Only where there are true men can there be true women. Whatever be the reasons, whether genetic or cultural, or both, the men of Gor are different from those of Earth. They have remained men, perhaps simply because it has pleased them to do so.
Explorers of Gor...page 305

"You understand, of course, Master." she said, "that I would not have spoken to a man of Earth, those pathetic and ineffectual fools, with the intimacy, the frankness and honesty with which I have addressed you, a man of Gor?"  I said nothing.
"What miserable weaklings they are." she said.
Rogue of Gor...page 213

Surely it is better to have a true man on any terms than to have half a man or no man at all! Men are masters; if the man be stong, the woman must submit. given the opportunity to relate to a true man, few woman will settle for less. Indeed, true women, in the belly of them, desire to submit to true men. It is an  ancient instinct bred into the bellies of beautiful, feminine women.
Slavegirl of Gor page 154

"The women of Earth," she said, "are starved for strong men. I cannot tell
you the restlessness, the misery and frustration they feel. The men of Earth are not true men. Perhaps once they were, long ago. But that is now history. Now they are weak and ineffectual. Manhood among them is measured by its lack. Nor longer are they capable of true manhood."
I doubted what she said, but, surely, I had no intention of explicitly gainsaying her, I thought it best to let her speak.
"Females," she said. "are the natural property of men such as Goreans, not of men such as those of Earth. It is men such as Goreans, and not men such as those of Earth, who recognize the meaning of our beauty and simply take us, and make us serve them, but I have bathed Master and now kneel naked and bound before Him. I tell him nothing."
Rogue of Gor... page 209

"There are true men in this place," explained the girl.
"Oh," I said, I did not understand her remark. Did she not know that true men repudiated their sovereignty, forsook their manhood and conformed to prescribed stereotypes? Was she not familiar with the political definitions? I wondered then if there might not be another sort of true men, true men, like true lions, who, innocent of negativistic conditionings, simply fulfilled themselves in the way of nature. Such men, I supposed, of course, could not exist. They, presumably, in the way of nature, would be less likely to pretend that women were the same as themselves than to simply relish them, to keep them, to dominate, own and treasure them, perhaps like horses or dogs, or, I thought, with a shudder, women.
Kajira of Gor...page 42

Sometimes slaves are skillful in immeshing masters in the toils of their beauty. How often do they conquer us with their softness! How often are we the victims of their delicious, insidious charms and wiles! What drums and alarms are found, upon occasion, in their glances and smiles. What battalions can march in a tearful eye and a trembling lip. What potent strategies can lurk in the line of a breast or the turn of a hip. How a bent knee and a bowed head can wrench a man's guts. Helplessness and vulnerability seem strange shields; how implausible is gentleness as an instrument of diplomacy; what an unlikely weapon is her tenderness. Who is most powerful, I wondered, the  master of the slave? Then I realized that it is the master who is most powerful for he may, if he wishes, put her on the block and sell her or dispose of her in any way he pleases. In the end, in the final analysis, it is he, and not she, who holds the whip. It is she who, in the end, must kneel at the feet of a master, completely at his mercy, her will, in the final analysis, nothing. It is she who, in the end, in the final analysis, is owned, and must please, absolutely.
Blood Brothers of Gor...page 316

it is not uncommon for masters to pride themselves on the depth with which they know their slave girls; this depth is far greater in my opinion than that with which the average husband of Earth knows his wife; the slave girl is not simply someone with whom the man lives; she is very special to him; she is a treasures possession; he owns her; he wants to know profoundly and deeply, the background, history, the mind, the intelligence, the appetites, the nature and dispositions of his lovely article of property; this knowledge, of course, puts her more at his mercy; by making it possible for him to manipulate her feelings, exploit weaknesses, drop asides, etc., she in the helpless condition of slavery, it gives him greater power over her. For example, it is common for a Master to force his girl to speak at length and in detail  to him of the secret sides of her nature, explaining and elaborating on her fantasies; if she is literate, she may be forced, naked and collared, on her knees at a small table, sometimes with her ankles shackled, to write them out; this supplies the Master, of course, with abundant materials which may be used by him to make her further and more helplessly his; sometimes the girl attempts to deceive the master; it is not difficult to detect inauthenticity in such matters; she is then beaten;  too, she may be at times ordered to invent fantasies, sometimes of a certain type; these, too, for she has invented them, are, to an astute Master, instructive; these intellectual, emotional exercises, performed by the girl under the condition of slavery particularly if coupled with an enforced exercise regime, posings under male surveillance, and such, can do much to sensitize her to her collar; they awaken her body, and, of equal importance for the Gorean,
  though not for the Earthling, who sees sex with the perception of a hippopotamus, as a matter of body rubbings, her fantastic imagination and mind; she becomes curious, soon, about the deeper implications of what she is, a mere article of her Masters property; then, with authority, with assurance and power, to the depth and height of her mind and imagination she is taught; the slave girl experiences a paradox of freedom; the free woman is physically free, but miserable, fighting to be what she is not; the slave girl, physically in bondage, even to the collar, sometimes chains, is given no choice by men but to be totally and precisely what she is, slave; such women, slaves, interestingly, are almost always joyful and vital; they are paradoxically, in their feelings and emotions, liberated; they are not pinched, not psychologically restrained; why this should be I do not know; to see such women , their heads held high, their eyes bright, their bodies , movements, beautiful, as no earth woman would dare to be, is quite pleasurable; some of them are so insolent, so proud of their collars, that I have cuffed them to my feet, to remind them that they are only slaves.
Tribesman of Gor pgs 42,43

"It was not necessary that you treated Susan as you did," I said. "Don't not attempt to interfere in the relationship between a man and his slave," he said. "That relationship is absolute."
"I see," I said. I stepped back, frightened.
Kajira of Gor. pg 172

"Gorean men ... you will learn are less tolerant of pretense then men of earth."
Beasts of Gor pg 202

"To be sure," smiled Callimachus, "their vengeance would doubtless be merciless and prompt." Tasdron shuddered. gorean men, in certain matters, tend not to be patient.
Rogue of Gor  page 230

Zosk sank down and sat cross legged in the road, his gigantic frame shaken with sobs, his massive head buried in his hands, his thick, guttural voice moaning with distress. At such a time a man may not be spoken to, for according to the Gorean way of thinking pity humiliates both he who pities and he who is pitied. According to the Gorean way, one may love but one may not pity.
Outlaw of Gor  Page 31

The Goreans believe that the capacity to master a tarn is innate and that some men possess this characteristic and that some do not. One does not learn to master a tarn. It is a matter of blood and spirit, of beast and man, of a relation between two beings which must be immediate, intuitive, spontaneous. It is said that a tarn knows who is a tarnsman and who is not, and that those who are not die in this first meeting."
Tarnsman of Gor  Page 51