In Chains Quotes

“I think that perhaps there are no such defining moments at all. Beginnings and ends are fluid, long chains of events where some links seem so insignificant and others so very momentous, while in fact all have the same weight. What may appear as a single dramatic moment is just a link between what was before and what comes after.”

— Linda Olsson

“Our contemporaries are constantly wracked by two warring passions: they feel the need to be led and the desire to remain free. Unable to destroy either of these contrary instincts, they seek to satisfy both at once. They imagine a single, omnipotent, tutelary power, but one that is elected by the citizens. They combine centralization with popular sovereignty. This gives them some respite. They console themselves for being treated as wards by imagining that they have chosen their own protectors. Each individual allows himself to be clapped in chains because that the other end of the chain is held not by a man or a class but by the people themselves.”

— Alexis De Tocqueville

“You sure are a sweet girl, Scout. I'm half tempted to keep you."
"Ummm ... Thanks?" Knowing she was a potential Alpha I worried about what "keeping me" might entail. Probably chains. And whips. And maybe a dog collar.
And now I was going to have to live with scary Fifty Shades Aunt Rachel pictures living in my head for all time.”

— Tammy Blackwell

“I turned on my heel and left her, exasperated that even as I worked my fingers to the bone to liberate women from our cloth chains, our minds remained as closed as ever to the possibility that we might deserve more than a husband, children, and growing old cooking sausage.”

— C.W. Gortner

“They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horseman, swirling mists and sudden winds, insubstantial specters and sheeted creatures, vampires and bloodhounds, bats and rats and spiders, of men found at dawn and women turned white-haired and raving lunatic, and of vanished corpses and curses upon heirs.”

— Susan Hill

“You said you freed me, but freedom isn't defined by chains or walls. You, alive, with me. That's my freedom.”

— Pam Godwin

“Plouton's eyes narrowed coldly, and he grinned because he counted the result of this conversation as a tremendous and absolute victory over his older brother.
Abbadon never saw his younger brother as competition or even as an enemy, but Plouton hated his brother from the bottom of his heart. He was controlled and possessed by his own negative thoughts, that his father, King Apollyon, loved and trusted Abbadon more and that he disliked and rejected him.
Plouton was jealous ... very jealous.
He raised his eyebrows and opened his silvery eyes as wide as they could go. Diabolic sparkles appeared in his eyes. He grinned again when he thought about the Titans, the cave, the iron chains, the vultures, and the unforgiving ocean at the Rock of Mukane. (Maradonia and the Gold of Ophir)”

— Gloria Tesch

“Only the never-ending work of mourning can help us from lapsing into the illusion that we have found the parent we once urgently needed-empathic and open, understanding and understandable, honest and available, helpful and loving, feeling, transparent, clear, without unintelligible contradictions. Such a parent was never ours, for a mother can react empathically only to the extent that she has become free of her own childhood; when she denies the vicissitudes of her early life, she wears invisible chains.”

— Alice Miller

“The movie Koyaanisqatsi shows non-commented time-lapse footage and focuses our attention on the very rhythm of our civilized modern life and nature. A marijuana high can do something for a user similar to what this time-lapse footage does. The enhancement of episodic memory and the acceleration of associative streams of memories can alter and enhance our recognition of patterns in our lives in various ways. If we are presented with quick associative chains of past experiences, we can see a pattern in a body of information that is usually not at once presented to our "inner eye" as such.”

— Sebastian Marincolo

“It is difficult, my dear Lucius, to escape becoming the person others believe one to be. A slave is twice enslaved, once by his chains and once again by the glances that fall upon him and say thou slave.”

— Thornton Wilder

“And it beats inside me, this terrible hope, as I know that the end has begun, and I am finally awake. "Break the chains," I roar. And my people roar back.”

— Pierce Brown

“For seven hundred years, we have been enslaved. Your people. My people. We have languished in the darkness. Bu there will come a day when we walk in the light. It will not come from their mercy. It will not come by fate. It will come when brave hearts rise and choose to break the chains.”

— Pierce Brown

“All around him people were eating their unfood wih, if not actual evidence of enjoyment, then with no more actual disgust than was to be found in burger chains all over the planet. He stood up, took his tray over to the PLEASE DISPOSE OF YOUR REFUSE WITH CARE receptacle, and dumped the whole thing. If you had told him that there were children starving in Africa he would have been flattered that you'd noticed.”

— Terry Pratchett

“My generals should be like bull terriers on chains, and they should want war, war, war ... But what happens now? I want to go ahead with my aggressive politics and the generals try to stop me. That's a false situation.”

— Adolf Hitler

“Memories are the most powerful chains,”

— Chloe Neill

“Chains reached over and grabbed Locke's fist, then mimed swinging it into Calo's jaw. "Repeat as necessary," said Chains, "until your problems are spitting up teeth.”

— Scott Lynch

“If it weren't for me, she wouldn't have to take jobs like this. She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar. I felt my guilt like a brand ... I had seen girls clamor for new clothes and complain about what their mothers made for dinner. I was always mortified. Didn't they know they were tying their mothers to the ground? Weren't chains ashamed of their prisoners?”

— Janet Fitch

“In war," answered the weaver, "the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor. We must work to live, and they give us such mean wages that we die. We toil for them all day long, and they heap up gold in their coffers, and our children fade away before their time, and the faces of those we love become hard and evil. We tread out the grapes, another drinks the wine. We sow the corn, and our own board is empty. We have chains, though no eye beholds them; and are slaves, though men call us free.”

— Oscar Wilde

“Experience tells me that people's hearts are seldom changed if they are not changed when young. Seldom indeed are men converted when they are old. Habits have deep roots. Sin once allowed to nestle in your bosom will not be turned out at your bidding. Custom becomes second nature, and its chains are not easily broken.”

— J.C. Ryle

“With a global society hungry for luxury, distribution and supply chains are now as important for executives as a hands-on feel for products.”

— Suzy Menkes

“This popular picture of Marx's 'materialism' - his anti-spiritual tendency, his wish for uniformity and subordination - is utterly false. Marx's aim was that of the spiritual emancipation of man, of his liberation from the chains of economic determination, of restituting him in his human wholeness, of enabling him to find unity and harmony with his fellow man and with nature. Marx's philosophy was, in secular, nontheistic language, a new and radical step forward in the tradition of prophetic Messianism; it was aimed at the full realization of individualism, the very aim which has guided Western thinking from the Renaissance and the Reformation far into the nineteenth century.”

— Erich Fromm

“It's often better to be in chains than to be free.”

— Franz Kafka

“July 4, the day we celebrate giving our political masters independence from conscience, morality, consequences for evil doing, and basic social and economic reality.
The fireworks are the glowing tears of your children's incinerated futures.
Cheer happy slaves - your only chains are your deluded joys. Cheer and sing, because for you, songs of death are easier than questions of life.”

— Stefan Molyneux

“Every human cell, with its thousands of protein chains, is more complex than a 747 or the largest cruise ship, in fact more complex than the two combined. All life on Earth, in its extravagant variety, offers itself for study, but though we probe to ever deeper layers of its structure, the meaning eludes us.”

— Dean Koontz

“Once again it is demonstrated that people do not love their chains or their jailers,-and that the aspiration for a civilized life - that "universal eligibility to be noble," as Saul Bellow's Augie March so imperishably phrases it - is proper and common to all.”

— Christopher Hitchens

“The Cloud Ark Constitution is now in effect." Dinah drew breath, knowing what this meant. Markus spelled it out anyway. "This means that all nation-states of Earth, and their governments and constitutions, no longer exist. Their military and civilian chains of command are no more. Oaths you may have taken to them, allegiances you may have held, loyalties you may have felt, citizenships you may have had are now and forever dissolved. The rights granted you by the Cloud Ark Constitution, no more and no less, are your rights. The laws and responsibilities of the Cloud Ark Constitution now bind you. You are citizens of a new nation now, the only nation. Long may it endure.”

— Neal Stephenson

“It isn't a coincidence that governments everywhere want to educate children. Government education, in turn, is supposed to be evidence of the state's goodness and its concern for our well-being. The real explanation is less flattering. If the government's propaganda can take root as children grow up, those kids will be no threat to the state apparatus. They'll fasten the chains to their own ankles. H.L. Mencken once said that the state doesn't just want to make you obey. It tries to make you want to obey. And that's one thing the government schools do very well.”

— Llewellyn Rockwell

“It is the nature of slavery to render its victims so abject that at last, fearing to be free, they multiply their own chains. You can liberate a freeman, but you cannot liberate a slave.”

— Louis J. Halle

“Woman has so long been subject to the disabilities and restrictions with which her progress has been embarrassed that she has become enervated, her mind to some extent paralyzed; and like those still more degraded by personal bondage she hugs her chains.”

— Lucretia Mott

“But I grew to love these spontaneous gatherings in shopping malls, university bookstores, and specialty bookshops that couldn't be replaced by the big chains, all the spaces with coffee, comfortable chairs, and the presence of books that allow people to browse and discover interests they didn't know they had.”

— Gloria Steinem

“There are lots of small businesses in Britain that have a pretty tough time but many of them are also parts of supply chains, the leave side roll out JCB but that's one company, all the experts are saying the economy would take a big hit if we came out of the EU.”

— Frances O'Grady

“Revolt, for you have nothing to lose but your chains and your [refugee] tents!”

— George Habash

“In America, we have achieved the Orwellian prediction - enslaved, the people have been programmed to love their bondage and are left to clutch only mirage-like images of freedom, its fables and fictions. The new slaves are linked together by vast electronic chains of television that imprison not their bodies but their minds. Their desires are programmed, their tastes manipulated, their values set for them.”

— Gerry Spence

“Releasing the chains to the material means experiencing life within each cell, moment to moment, each moment renewed.”

— Barbara Brennan

“It had been happy for me if I could have lived a private life in peace and plenty, enjoying all the happiness that results from a well-tempered society founded on mutual esteem. But the injury done my country, and the chains of slavery forging for all posterity, calls me forth to defend our common rights, and repel the bold invaders of the sons of freedom.”

— Nathanael Greene

“And if the Son has set us free Then we must be, free indeed Let the chains fall away, starting today. Everything has changed I'm finally free ...”

— Nichole Nordeman

“It's terrible to lie in chains,
To rot in dungeon deep,
But it's still worse, when you are free
To sleep, and sleep, and sleep.”

— Taras Shevchenko

“By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master?”

— Walter Rodney

“I hate The Police so much I'd probably assassinate Sting,
My System of a Down Rages Against the Machine.
Tie you up in a Slipknot and hold Alice In Chains inside her dreams.”

— Chino XL

“Their property held them in chains ... chains which shackled their courage and choked their faith and hampered their judgment and throttled their soul ... If they stored up their treasure in heaven, they would not now have an enemy and a thief within their own household ... They think of themselves as owners, whereas it is they rather who are owned: enslaved as they are to their own property, they are not the masters of their money but its slaves.”

— Cyprian

“We look back, already, with astonishment, at the daring outrages committed by despotism, on the reason and rights of man; we look forward with joy, to the period, when it shall be despoiled of all its usurpations, and bound forever in the chains, with which it had loaded its miserable victims.”

— James Madison

“If one is free at heart, no man-made chains can bind one to servitude.”

— Steven Biko

“The conservatives see man as a body freely roaming the earth, building sand piles or factories - with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington. The liberals see man as a soul freewheeling to the farthest reaches of the universe - but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread.”

— Ayn Rand

“Get rid of the bondage of body; we have become slaves to it and learnt to hug our chains and love our slavery; so much so that we long to perpetuate it, and go on with "body" "body" for ever. Do not cling to the idea of "body", do not look for a future existence in any way like this one; do not love or want the body, even of those dear to us.”

— Swami Vivekananda

“Liberty for all; chains for none.”

— Frederick Douglass

“What but education has advanced us beyond the condition of our indigenous neighbors? And what chains them to their present state of barbarism and wretchedness but a bigoted veneration for the supposed superlative wisdom of their fathers and the preposterous idea that they are to look backward for better things and not forward, longing, as it should seem, to return to the days of eating acorns and roots rather than indulge in the degeneracies of civilization?”

— Thomas Jefferson

“Let us imagine a number of men in chains and all condemned to death, where some are killed each day in the sight of the others, and those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows and wait their turn, looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope. It is an image of the condition of man.”

— Blaise Pascal

“Some say no evil thing that walks by night, In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen, Blue meagre hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost That breaks his magic chains at curfew time, No goblin, or swart fairy of the mine, Hath hurtful power o'er true virginity.”

— John Milton

“When I go to bed at night, I've got so much grease on my body I wear snow chains to hold up my gown.”

— Phyllis Diller

“Man is to be held only by the slightest chains; with the idea that he can break them at pleasure, he submits to them in sport.”

— Maria Edgeworth