Fetters Quotes - Page 4

• The fetters of tyranny were not stricken from America for the sake of Americans alone.

  Orson F. Whitney

  America, Sake, Tyranny

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• How much pleasure they lose (and even the pleasures of heroic poesy are not unprofitable) who take away the liberty of a poet, and fetter his feet in the shackles of a historian.

  William Davenant

  Feet, Liberty, Heroic

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• I also have in mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Class, Mind, Gold

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “Citizen Thoreau: Walden, Civil Disobedience, Life Without Principle, Slavery in Massachusetts, A Plea for Captain John Brown”, p.20, Graphic Arts Books

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• A warlike nation like the Germans, without either cities, letters, arts, or money, found some compensation for this savage state in the enjoyment of liberty. Their poverty secured their freedom, since our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism.

  Edward Gibbon

  Art, Cities, History

  Edward Gibbon (1854). “The history of the decline and fall of the Roman empire, with notes by Milman and Guizot. Ed. by W. Smith”, p.359

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• What does Christianity mean today? National Socialism is a religion. All we lack is a religious genius capable of uprooting outmoded religious practices and putting new ones in their place. We lack traditions and ritual. One day soon National Socialism will be the religion of all Germans. My Party is my church, and I believe I serve the Lord best if I do his will, and liberate my oppressed people from the fetters of slavery. That is my gospel.

  Joseph Goebbels

  Religious, Party, Believe

  Diary entry, October 16, 1928.

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• We should cast aside all childish games that fetter and exhaust body, speech and mind.
  Stretching out in inconceivable nonaction, in the unstructured matrix, the actuality of emptiness,
  where the natural perfection of reality lies, we should gaze at the uncontrived sameness of every experience,
  all conditioning and ambition resolved with finality.

  Longchenpa

  Lying, Ambition, Reality

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• Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Freedom, Tyrants, Mind

  Charles Caleb Colton (1824). “Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think”, p.217

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• I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.

  Albert Einstein

  God, Religious, Atheist

  Letter to Guy H. Raner Jr., September 28, 1949.

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• Your freedom when it loses its fetters becomes itself the fetter of a greater freedom.

  Khalil Gibran

  Freedom, Liberty, Greater

  Khalil Gibran (2007). “Kahlil Gibran: Masterpieces”

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• True meditation gives us, as it were, wings for flight to a higher realm and thus detaches us from terrestrial fetters.

  Swami Paramananda

  Wings, Giving, Meditation

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• Fetters of gold are still fetters, and the softest lining can never make them so easy as liberty.

  Mary Astell

  Justice, Diversity, Liberty

  'An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex' (1696) p. 25

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• The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall. Freedom and slavery are mental states.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Inspirational, Freedom, Fall

  Non-Violence in Peace and War (1949) vol. 2, ch. 5

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• Awake! thou that sleepest, arise from the dead! The Lord still lives today. His power has never abated. His Word has never changed. The things He did in Bible days, He still lives to do today. Not a burden is there He cannot bear nor a fetter He cannot break.

  Aimee Semple McPherson

  Live For Today, Bears, Christianity

  Aimee Semple McPherson (2009). “This is That: Personal Experiences Sermons and Writings of Aimee Semple McPherson”, p.677, Wipf and Stock Publishers

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• I love thee so, that, maugre all thy pride,
  Nor wit nor reason can my passion hide.
  Do not extort thy reasons from this clause,
  For that I woo, thou therefore hast no cause
  But rather reason thus with reason fetter,
  Love sought is good, but given unsought better.

  William Shakespeare

  Love You, Passion, Pride

  1601 Olivia.Twelfth Night, act 3, sc.1, l.154.

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• Through it [Science] we believe that man will be saved from misery and degradation, not merely acquiring new material powers, but learning to use and to guide his life with understanding. Through Science he will be freed from the fetters of superstition; through faith in Science he will acquire a new and enduring delight in the exercise of his capacities; he will gain a zest and interest in life such as the present phase of culture fails to supply.

  Ray Lankester

  Faith, Believe, Science

  "The Advancement of Science: Occasional Essays & Addresses". Book by Ray Lankester, p. 108-9, "Biology and the State", 1890.

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• Fondnesse it were for any being free,
  To covet fetters, though they golden bee.

  Edmund Spenser

  Freedom, Being Free, Bees

  Edmund Spenser (1842). “Poetical Works ...: Miscellaneous poems”, p.326

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• Yes, marriage is hateful, detestable. A kind of ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most despotic, most unrequited fetter which prejudice has forged to confine its energies.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Marriage, Thinking, Mind

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1988). “Shelley's Prose: Or the Trumpet of a Prophecy”

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• There is a devilish mercy in the judge, if you'll implore it, that will free your life, but fetter you till death.

  William Shakespeare

  Judging, Mercy, Ifs

  William Shakespeare, George Steevens, Edmond Malone, Charles Symmons (1842). “The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare: From the Text of the Corrected Copies of Steevens and Malone, with a Life of the Poet”, p.84

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• But there is no such man; for, brother, men
  Can counsel and speak comfort to that grief
  Which they themselves not feel; but, tasting it,
  Their counsel turns to passion, which before
  Would give preceptial medicine to rage,
  Fetter strong madness in a silken thread,
  Charm ache with air and agony with words.

  William Shakespeare

  Strong, Brother, Grief

  William Shakespeare (2016). “The New Oxford Shakespeare: Modern Critical Edition: The Complete Works”, p.1491, Oxford University Press

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• Things good in themselves ... perfectly valid in the integrity of their origins, become fetters if they cannot alter.

  Freya Stark

  Integrity, Adaptability, Ifs

  Freya Stark (2011). “The Lycian Shore”, p.86, Tauris Parke Paperbacks

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• Let it stand, therefore, as an indubitable truth, which no engines can shake, that the mind of man is so entirely alienated from the righteousness of God that he cannot conceive, desire, or design any thing but what is wicked, distorted, foul, impure, and iniquitous; that his heart is so thoroughly envenomed by sin that it can breathe out nothing but corruption and rottenness; that if some men occasionally make a show of goodness, their mind is ever interwoven with hypocrisy and deceit, their soul inwardly bound with the fetters of wickedness.

  John Calvin

  Heart, Men, Hypocrisy

  John Calvin (2012). “The Institutes Of The Christian Religion (Annotated Edition)”, p.299, Jazzybee Verlag

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• A free press stands as one of the great interpreters between the government and the people. To allow it to be fettered is to fetter ourselves.

  George Sutherland

  Government, People, Free Press

  Grosjean v. American Press Co., 297 U.S. 233, (251), 1936.

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• It is well to fetter the wings of our fancy and restrain its flights. It is quite possible we may have formed entirely erroneous ideas of what we actually see. The greenish gray patches may not be seas at all, nor the ruddy continents, solid land. Neither may the obscuring patches be clouds of vapor. Man is too quick at forming conclusions. Let him but indistinctly see a thing, or even be undecided as to whether he does actually see it and he will then and there set himself to theorizing, and build immense castles of conjecture on a foundation, of whose existence he is by no means certain.

  Edward E. Barnard

  Mean, Men, Clouds

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• Many a one cannot loosen his own fetters, but is nevertheless his friend's emancipator.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Self, Nevertheless

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2016). “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, p.65, Jester House Publishing

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• Unless the gods deceive my mind , That man is forging fetters for himself.

  Theognis of Megara

  Men, Mind, Deceiving

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