Captivity Is Always Captivity Quotes & Sayings

One cannot always tell what it is that keeps us shut in, confines us, seems to bury us, but still one feels certain barriers, certain gates, certain walls. Is all this imagination, fantasy? I do not think so. And then one asks: My God! Is it for long, is it for ever, is it for eternity? Do you know what frees one from this captivity? It is very deep serious affection. Being friends, being brothers, love, that is what opens the prison by supreme power, by some magic force. - Vincent van Gogh, letter to his brother, July 1880 — Andre Agassi

I'm a liberal. I'm confused when that became a bad word ... — George Clooney

If we seek solace in the prisons of the distant past
Security in human systems we're told will always always last
Emotions are the sail and blind faith is the mast
Without the breath of real freedom we're getting nowhere fast.
(History Will Teach Us Nothing) — Sting

The best security for civilization is the dwelling, and upon properly appointed and becoming dwellings depends, more than anything else, the improvement of mankind. — Benjamin Disraeli

MONDAY morning found Tom Sawyer miserable. Monday morning always found him so - because it began another week's slow suffering in school. He generally began that day with wishing he had had no intervening holiday, it made the going into captivity and fetters again so much more odious. — Mark Twain

Sharpe had no thought of deserting now, for now he was about to fight. If there was any one good reason to join the army, it was to fight. Not to hurry up and do nothing, but to fight the King's enemies, and this enemy had been shocked by the awful violence of the close-range volley and now they stared in horror as the redcoats screamed and ran towards them. The 33rd, released from the tight discipline of the ranks, charged eagerly. There was loot ahead. Loot and food and stunned men to slaughter and there were few men in the 33rd who did not like a good fight. Not many had joined the ranks out of patriotism; instead, like Sharpe, they had taken the King's shilling because hunger or desperation had forced them into uniform, but they were still good soldiers. They came from the gutters of Britain where a man survived by savagery rather than by cleverness. They were brawlers and bastards, alley-fighters with nothing to lose but tuppence a day. — Bernard Cornwell

Mystical writing was indeed the forerunner of today's radical theology and deconstruction ...
Jacques Derrida can be described as an intellectual subversive whose work leads to the view that any text may be interpreted to mean almost anything, and as a mystic will.
Well, yes, mystical writing is indeed politically and linguistically subversive and always was so the mystic seeks to create an effect of religious happiness by liberating religious language from the Babylonian captivity of metaphysics. When the writing does succeed in melting God and the soul down into each other, the effect of happiness is astonishing. — Don Cupitt

Captivity is always captivity, no matter how gentle the jailer. — John Hargrove

Liars make the best promises. — Pierce Brown

The ponderous tomes are bales of the mind's merchandise. — Robert Aris Willmott

Orwell's short and intense life has for years borne witness to some of those verities of which we were already aware. Parties and churches and states cannot be honest, but individuals can. Real books cannot be written by machines or committees. The truth is not always easy to discern, but a lie can and must be called by its right name. And the imagination, like certain wild animals, as Orwell himself once put it, will not breed in captivity. Actually, that last metaphor is beautiful but inaccurate. Even in the most dire conditions, there is a human will to resist coercion. We must believe that even now in North Korea, there are ideas alive inside human brains that were not put there by any authority. — Christopher Hitchens

People who blame are always looking to "get out" of something, but like quicksand, the more they struggle the more they are captive. — Bryant McGill

Observations show that primates in the wild show little aggression, while primates in the zoo can show an excessive amount of destructiveness. This distinction is of fundamental importance for the understanding of human aggression because man thus far in his history has hardly ever lived in his "natural habitat,", with the exception of the hunters and food gatherers and the first agriculturalists down to the fifth millenium B.C. "Civilized" man has always lived in the "Zoo" - i.e. in various degrees of captivity and unfreedom - and this is still true, even in the most advanced societies. — Erich Fromm

On entering a place where animals are bred, my first thoughts are always about enslavement. Force. Captivity. — Alice Walker

That was what made fighting so easy - you could always choose death rather than captivity. — Cornelia Funke

Stability and order have always been paid for with captivity and blood. (76) — Mary Doria Russell

A sermon often does a man most good when it makes him most angry. Those people who walk down the aisles and say, "I will never hear that man again," very often have an arrow rankling in their breast. — Charles Spurgeon

I've always had a repulsion going in a place where animals are in captivity. — Marion Cotillard

I'm always struck with writing - I constantly feel like I don't know what I'm doing and I'm starting over. — Ali Liebegott

Christian holy duty is to know the Lord Jesus Christ. — Lailah Gifty Akita

When I think back, I get mad at what they did to those poor men. Ernie must have had PTSD - they called it shell shock - and the doctors told him to keep it all bottled up inside. They didn't know any better, but it was like treating syphilis with candy bars. — Anita Diamant

She was right. The purebred girls were making mistakes on purpose, in order to give us an advantage. 'King me,' I growled, out of turn. 'I say king me!' and Felicity meekly complied. Beulah pretended not to mind when we got frustrated with the oblique, fussy movement from square to square and shredded the board to ribbons. I felt sorry for them. I wondered what it would be like to be bred in captivity, and always homesick for a dimly sensed forest, the trees you've never seen. — Karen Russell

Do not train children to learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds. — Plato

I haven't done a book for about 3 or 4 years now. — Gerald Scarfe