Quotes & Sayings About Shackles

Listen. The letter that's written but never gets sent, the tweets that were tweeted but not really meant; the whispers once whispered get lost in the fray, they shout and shout but the noise fades away; the thoughts that live on entirely in minds, the worlds of difference in how thoughts are aligned; the screams and the anguish, the love and the fear, the chains and the tethers, the shackles and spears, one day it all lifts, and we pause to revere, the real, the ideal, the love that we hear. — Andreas Butler

Sometimes we are our own worst enemies. One must learn to be discerning with one's own thoughts. We must be able to decipher the truth versus the lies of our minds. Otherwise, we become enslaved to the shackles of struggle we place on our own ankles. — Brittainy C. Cherry

It is more difficult by far to be independent of our own inner shackles than it is of the shackles that others might place upon us. — R.A. Salvatore

Please don't waste-away in front of a TV waiting to win a lottery during the precious few hours you are not imprisoned in corporate shackles. — Bryant McGill

Sometimes she wished she could eat herself. She'd swallow everything - her soiled blue dress, the shackles on her wrists, her puffy face. If she could eat herself up, there'd be no trace left of her or the mistakes she had made. — Marie Rutkoski

Forgiveness is a choice you can make to free yourself from the shackles of your past, from pain, hurt and resentment. Forgiveness is your road to inner freedom. It does not mean that you need to forget, deny or condone what has transpired. You choose to forgive because forgiveness is the only way to transcend painful experiences and to attain inner peace and freedom. Transcending Abuse & Betrayal. — Sasha Samy

Forgiveness is the key to the heart's shackles. — Richard Paul Evans

In the act of selfishness, you bind demerit karma and in the act of sacrificing your own self-interest for the sake of others [selflessness], you bind merit karma. Nevertheless, they are both karma, aren't they? The fruit of merit karma is shackles of gold and fruit of demerit karma is shackles of iron but they are both indeed shackles, aren't they? — Dada Bhagwan

When it's hard to run, jog,
when it's hard to jog, walk,
when it's hard to walk, limp,
when it's hard to limp, crawl.
As long as you are headed to light
the shackles of darkness are left behind. — Matshona Dhliwayo

The greatest shackles we bear in thislife are those forged by our own fears — Richard Paul Evans

I am the twentieth century. I am the ragtime and the tango; sans-serif, clean geometry. I am the virgin's-hair whip and the cunningly detailed shackles of decadent passion. I am every lonely railway station in every capital of Europe. I am the Street, the fanciless buildings of government. the cafe-dansant, the clockwork figure, the jazz saxophone, the tourist-lady's hairpiece, the fairy's rubber breasts, the travelling clock which always tells the wrong time and chimes in different keys. I am the dead palm tree, the Negro's dancing pumps, the dried fountain after tourist season. I am all the appurtenances of night. — Thomas Pynchon

It's time to write dangerous music. It's time to take risks. It's time to wear your heart on your sleeve, and sing about the things that actually matter to you. It's time to bury the shackles of religious expectation and stop trying to put new clothes on the dead. — John Mark McMillan

It's not so bad."
Melancholia looked at her. "You're lying."
"I'll get used to it. So will you."
"I ... I don't think I'll be able to."
"I'll be there to help when you need it."
"But I hate you."
Valkyrie smiled. "No you don't."
"No, I do. I want to kill you and stuff."
"We actually became friends in those caves."
"That's not what happened, " said Melancholia.
"We're pals. We're buddies."
"If my wrists weren't in shackles, my hands would be round your throat."
"You want to hug my throat because we're friends. — Derek Landy

What is real? Is there more to reality than meets the eye? Yes! was Plato's answer over two millennia ago. In his famous cave analogy, he likened us to people who'd lived their entire lives shackled in a cave, facing a blank wall, watching the shadows cast by things passing behind them, and eventually coming to mistakenly believe that these shadows were the full reality. Plato argued that what we humans call our everyday reality is similarly just a limited and distorted representation of the true reality, and that we must free ourselves from our mental shackles to begin comprehending it. — Max Tegmark

Oh. Dane. That's his name, right?" she asked. "He took our phones and put the shackles on us, but said we could use the phone on the table. I'm not sure if it's some kind of dominance posturing," she trailed off for a moment. "Actually yeah, having been around him for more than thirty seconds, I'm relatively certain that this is one hundred percent, testosterone-laden alpha male posturing. Is Jake like this?"
"I might be an idiot," I said, "but even I wouldn't fall for this sort of thing. A guy who goes to this length to seem awesome must have a dick the size of a gherkin. — Lynn Red

In the 60s, political correctness became not a guideline for living, but a new set of shackles. A small and vocal part of the Black community lost sight of the fact that unity does not mean unanimity - Black people are not some standardly digestible quantity. In order to work together we do not have to become a mix of indistinguishable particles resembling a vat of homogenized chocolate milk. — Audre Lorde

Free yourself from the shackles of an oppressive reality. What's real to you is what you imagine and what you feel. If you manage your illusions wisely, you might get what you want, but you won't necessarily understand why it worked. — Scott Adams

He was one of the great intellectuals of the 1940s who completed
their higher studies in the West and returned to their country to
apply what they had learned there - lock, stock, and barrel - within
Egyptian academia. For people like them, "progress" and "the West"
were virtually synonymous, with all that that entailed by way of positive
and negative behavior. They all had the same reverence for the
great Western values - democracy, freedom, justice, hard work, and
equality. At the same time, they had the same ignorance of the nation's
heritage and contempt for its customs and traditions, which they considered
shackles pulling us toward Backwardness from which it was
our duty to free ourselves so that the Renaissance could be achieved. — Alaa Al Aswany

When you live in shackles to other people's opinions and moods and judgments, it is the equivalent of becoming a human streamer. And you're better than that. You're meant to be in the driver's seat of your life, not running alongside the car, trying to catch up! — Mandy Hale

Love does not involve emotions, then?" he asked her with a smile.
"It is not ruled by them," she told him. "Love is liking and companionship and respect and trust. Love does not dominate or try to possess. Love thrives only in a commitment to pure, mutual freedom. That is why marriage is so tricky. There are the marriage ceremony and the marriage vows and the necessity for fidelity -all of them suggestive of restraints, even imprisonment. Men talk of life sentences and leg shackles in connection with marriage, do they not? But marriage out to be just the opposite -two people agreeing to set each other free, — Mary Balogh

I have to tell you I love living in a world without clocks. The shackles are gone. I'm a puppy unleashed in a meadow of time.
Stargirl — Jerry Spinelli

Faced with the pain of freedom, man begs for his shackles. — Gerry Spence

I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls. — Anais Nin

Out of the lions' den for Daniel, the prison for Peter, the whale's belly for Jonah, Goliath's shadow for David the storm for the disciples, disease for the lepers, doubt for Thomas, the grave for Lazarus, and the shackles for Paul. God gets us through stuff. — Max Lucado

No, I wanted to say, he didn't cut off her hands because he didn't have to, he had cut them off long before, with years of keeping all authority in his own palms, all the rules and all the power and all the answers emanating from him and no one else. And if you don't understand that, if you've never been in such a family, then you can't know the way the mind shackles itself and amputates its own limbs so adeptly that you never think to miss them, never think that you had anything so obscene as choice. — Carolina De Robertis

It is not my nature, when I see a people borne down by the weight of their shackles - the oppression of tyranny - to make their life more bitter by heaping upon them greater burdens; but rather would I do all in my power to raise the yoke than to add anything that would tend to crush them. — Abraham Lincoln

The power of art can break the shackles that bind and divide human beings. — Daisaku Ikeda

He slid his hands to the back of her neck, fumbling for the necklace's clasp. He undid it and held the chain of rubies up, red and gold in the flickering candlelight. "No shackles for us," he said, "no matter how rich. — Susanna Fraser

Fantasy enabled me to break the shackles and create a whole new level of 'the world is in danger' stakes. — Matthew Reilly

What is a habit? It's just a shackle for ourselves. — Daniel Libeskind

To escape consumerism and conformity, you must turn your back and ignore the mainstream culture. The shackles when then fall away, the machines will grind to a halt, the filters will dissolve, and you will see the world for what it really is. The illusory nature of existence will end and we will all, finally, be real. — David McRaney

Only those who break the shackles of convention can ever achieve greatness. — Barry S. Brunswick

In the name of God, they stole her time and her freedom, putting shackles on her heart. They preached about God's kindness, but preached twice as much about his wrath and intolerance. — Haruki Murakami

The scientist's religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages. — Albert Einstein

The more you let your ego speak (there's no way in hell I'm going to do that!), or let fear dictate your decisions (log kya kahenge? I can't do that!), the more you let 'Life' take the reigns. You can ALWAYS take the reigns back and take control over your own destiny. You only need to break your own shackles. — Rupali Rajopadhye Rotti

It's time to believe again in the potential of private enterprise set free from the shackles of over-bearing federal government. — Rick Perry

Make men large and strong and tyranny will bankrupt itself in making shackles for them. — Henry Ward Beecher

Desire and love act at cross purposes. love is a net cast on eternity, desire is a stratagem to be spared the chores of net weaving.
True to their nature, love would strive to perpetuate the desire. Desire, on the other hand, would shun love's shackles. — Zygmunt Bauman

To belong to something - that's banal. Creed, ideal, wife or profession: nothing but prison cells and shackles. — Pessoa, Fernando

I wished that I were the owner of every southern slave, that I might cast off the shackles from their limbs, and witness the rapture which would excite them in the first dance of their freedom. — Thaddeus Stevens

There is a level of consciousness between sleeping and fully wakening when the worries of the day have not settled upon us; the body is stilled, and the senses wholly receptive. If the sun is bright, there is pure silence, or the birds are beginning to sing, this shining level of consciousness can come to be the nearest we will get to paradise this side of our quietus, Every day should begin so, This is no dream. This is the reality. The world outside is beautiful. We do our best to hide it. We cover it. We push it father back. The ugliness we make ourselves. We originate our own worries. We put on our own shackles; build our prisons. We can only glimpse the golden reality, briefly, through our tiny barred windows. — John Wyatt

But in our time women are no longer subject to the will of men. Quite the contrary. They have been given every opportunity to win their independence and if, after all this time, they still have not liberated themselves and thrown off their shackles, we can only arrive at one conclusion: there are no shackles to throw off. — Esther Vilar

Poets are Prisoners
8-29-2015
Poets are prisoners
Practitioners, commissioners &
conditioners of the spoken word
Caged by their own minds
Words are shackles — Debbie Tosun Kilday

An economy cannot long remain prosperous by government's taxing and spending more, now absorbing national output at a rate equal to the entire income of every American living west of the Mississippi. If this trend continues, America will gradually sink into the status of a Third World nation - more unemployment, more shackles on production, more poverty. — John Hospers

Without devotion, action and knowledge are cold and dry and many even become shackles. — Mahatma Gandhi

It was frightening, this new clarity of vision: but I felt free at last to know darkness as the other side of light, and that both were needed for sight.
And with that thought - it was almost as though I felt it in truth - the shackles of my old imprisoned self fell away at last. No more did I long for a warm bed behind safe walls. My heart drank in the beauty and wonder and danger of the world, and I saw for the first time that life was not something to survive, but something - the only thing - to be savoured in all its diversity. Light and dark together, mingled in all things, giving depth and substance where either alone was a pale shadow. I felt from that moment I might begin to find all things new. — Elizabeth Kerner

He felt the imaginary weight of shackles press against his soul. He bound himself to her once more. — Abbie Chandler

Yet the world of 2014 is already a world in which culture is releasing itself from the shackles of biology. Our — Yuval Noah Harari

You know the story of the prodigal son?" Pastor Voss asked. "It's powerful, don't you think? The father running out to the wayward-turned-repentant son, giving him the best clothes, preparing a giant feast. All to celebrate his return. I always wonder, when I read that story, how different it would have been if, instead of accepting his father's gift, the son would have worn sackcloth and worked in his father's pigsty ... Loses some of its power that way, doesn't it?"
"You think that's what I'm doing?"
"God's calling you to be His son, not His slave. He doesn't want you to wear shackles, Davis. Not when He's already cut you free. — Katie Ganshert

Many Christians ... find themselves defeated by the most psychological weapon that Satan uses against them. This weapon has the effectiveness of a deadly missile. Its name? Low self-esteem. Satan's greatest psychological weapon is a gut level feeling of inferiority, inadequacy, and low self-worth This feeling shackles many Christians, in spite of wonderful spiritual experiences and knowledge of God's Word. Although they understand their position as sons and daughters of God, they are tied up in knots, bound by a terrible feeling inferiority, and chained to a deep sense of worthlessness. — David A. Seamands

Before, they had been beasts, their instincts fitly adapted to their surrounds. Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never dies, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence, begun in agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau
and for what? It was the wantonness of it that stirred me. — H.G.Wells

If chained is where you have been, your arms will always bear marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You'll look at the scars on your arms and see more ugliness, or you'll take great care to look away from them and see nothing. Either way, you have no words for the story of where you came from. — Barbara Kingsolver

Subject: Sundown
Date: June 14 2011 09:35
To: Christian Grey
Dear Completely & Utterly Smitten
I love waking up with you, too. But I love being in bed with you and in elevators and on pianos and billiard tables and boats and desks and showers and bathtubs and strange wooden crosses with shackles and four poster beds with red satin sheets and boathouses and childhood bedrooms.
Yours
Sex Mad and Insatiable xx — E.L. James

People view us and our vampires as abominations," Ghastek said. "They call the undead inhuman, not realizing the irony: only humans are capable of inhumanity. Four thousand years of technology, with magic shrinking to a mere trickle before the Shift, yet the world was just as evil then as it is now. It's not vampires or werewolves who committed the worst atrocities, but average people. They are the serial killers, the child rapists, the inquisitors, the witch hunters, the perpetrators of monstrous deeds. The shackles on my wall are the symbol of humanity's capacity for cruelty. I keep them to remind myself that I must fear those who fear me. — Ilona Andrews

Words crowded his mouth, but he spoke none of them. Not about the sharp delight he had taken in brutally asphyxiating an innocent creature. Not about the desire to do it again, and to harness that power and unleash it any way he chose. He couldn't speak, either, of the wrenching sadness that permeated him as he realized that something in him had broken, or the delight at having been freed of its shackles. — Christie Golden

right; maybe once you stripped away the rationalizations, it always came down to a simple matter of escape. An escape from poverty or boredom or crime or the shackles of your skin. — Barack Obama

To expect that the intricacies of science will be pierced by a careless glance, or the eminences of fame ascended without labour, is to expect a peculiar privilege, a power denied to the rest of mankind; but to suppose that the maze is inscrutable to diligence, or the heights inaccessible to perseverance, is to submit tamely to the tyranny of fancy, and enchain the mind in voluntary shackles. — Samuel Johnson

I know realized that this was how you enslaved a people. You didn't just bring them over in chains from Africa. No, you convinced them that they were inferior, not evolved, subhuman, and then you took off their shackles, so they could go to work, you'd still have them enslaved and shackled inside of their minds for hundreds of years. And this system of teaching was fine with most Anglo teachers, because int he act of convincing us, los Mexicanos and the Blacks, we were subhuman, they'd also convinced themselves that they were superior! — Victor Villasenor

Obstacles will always be there, but you can be triumphant over the shackles of the past and break through all obstacles. — Shane DeCreshio

I suppose the more established one gets, you have what's called a reputation, and so you want to protect that and preserve that. And I think the bravery really comes in one's mid career where you then are constantly trying to move beyond that and move past that, because those so-called successors can become shackles. — Cate Blanchett

Covetousness puts money above manhood. It shackles its devotee and makes him its victim. It hardens the heart and deadens the noble impulses and destroys the vital qualities of life. — Billy Graham

Embodiments know not what slavery may be where minds in shackles and chains put nature to shame
Mind, shallow or neat, are found where thoughts may run deep, a family whereacceptance is free, and readers where reception is key.
Say minds may run free. — Dew Platt

He is lying on dirty straw. He has been beaten so many times, his body is one bloodied bruise; he is filthy, he is hideous, he is a sinner and he is utterly unloved. At any moment, at any instant, he will be put on a train in his shackles and taken through Cerberus's mouth to Hades for the rest of his wretched life. And it is at that precise moment that the light shines from the door of his dark cell #7, and in front of him Tatiana stands, tiny, determined, disbelieving, having returned for him. Having abandoned the infant boy who needs her most to go find the broken beast who needs her most. She stands mutely in front of him and doesn't see the blood, doesn't see the filth, sees only the man, and then he knows; he is not cast out. He is loved. — Paullina Simons

The Indian Bureau system is wrong. The only way to adjust wrong is to abolish it, and the only reform is to let my people go. After freeing the Indian from the shackles of government supervision, what is the Indian going to do: leave that with the Indian, and it is none of your business. — Carlos Montezuma

Our starting-point must be the fact that God cannot be named ... no mind has yet contained or language embraced God's substance in its fullness. No, we use facts connected with Him to outline qualities that correspond with Him, collecting a faint and feeble mental image from various quarters. Our noblest theologian is not one who has discovered the whole - our earthly shackles do not permit us the whole - but one whose mental image is by comparison fuller, who has gathered in his mind a richer picture, outline, or whatever we call it, of the truth. — Gregory Of Nazianzus

The attempts to command the climate and decide about the temperature on our planet are wrong and arrogant. I wrote a book about it which was published in English under the title 'Blue Planet in Green Shackles.' — Vaclav Klaus

Accepting the facts is always tough, so we search for forgiveness to this universe everyday to break the shackles, hurt is a prison and I from a very young young age refused to be held prisoner or even conform. — Aidan McNally

take the opposite approach: Voters' lack of decisiveness changes everything. Voting is not a slight variation on shopping. Shoppers have incentives to be rational. Voters do not. The naive view of democracy, which paints it as a public forum for solving social problems, ignores more than a few frictions. It overlooks the big story inches beneath the surface. When voters talk about solving social problems, they primary aim is to boost their self-worth by casting off the workaday shackles of objectivity. — Bryan Caplan

When making a decision, focus on what feels "shackles off" versus "shackles on". — Martha Beck

An organizer working in and for an open society is in an ideological dilemma to begin with, he does not have a fixed truth
truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing ... To the extent that he is free from the shackles of dogma, he can respond to the realities of the widely different situations ... — Saul Alinsky

Five hundred years of science have liberated humanity from the shackles of enforced ignorance. — Lawrence M. Krauss

The only chains God wants us to wear are the chains of righteousness
not the chains of hopeless subjectivism, not the shackles of risk-free living, not the fetters of horoscope decision making
just the chains befitting a bond servant of Christ Jesus. Die to self. Live for Christ. And then do what you want, and go where you want, for God's glory. — Kevin DeYoung

Nothing upsets the philosophical mind more than when he hears that from now on all philosophy is supposed to lie caught in the shackles of one system. Never has he felt greater than when he sees before him the infinitude of knowledge. The entire dignity of his science consists in the fact that it will never be completed. In that moment in which he would believe to have completed his system, he would become unbearable to himself. He would, in that moment, cease to be a creator, and would instead descend to being an instrument of his creation. — Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

She batted her eyelashes & readjusted her shackles as if they were lace gloves. — Sarah J. Maas

Realistically, it's a risk, I suppose, but in this day and age, you almost have to choose between freedom, which can devolve into chaos, and security, which can become a pair of shackles. — Ann Aguirre

The weak link-- she liked the ring of it. To seek the imperfection in the chain that keeps you in bondage. Taken individually, the link was not much. But in concert with its fellows, a mighty iron that subjugated millions despite its weakness. The people she chose, young and old, from the rich part of town or the more modest streets, did not individually persecute Cora. As a community, they were shackles. If she kept at it, chipping away at weak links wherever she found them, it might add up to something. — Colson Whitehead

Greek women were not allowed to be: free and untamed. In fact, Artemis is a bit of a paradox. On the one hand, her commitment to purity must have been greatly admired by Ancient Greeks; yet she is also untamable and answers to no man. She is truly the eternal wild child who never has to grow up and shoulder the responsibilities that adulthood brings. She never has to compromise herself or conform to any of society's standards. No wonder she is associated with the moon - completely untouchable, forever unattainable. If offered the option of becoming one of Artemis' immortal maidens, freed forever from the shackles of marriage or slavery, I think many Ancient Greek women would have jumped on that bandwagon as it careened past — Rick Riordan

I refuse to accept that the shackles of slavery can ever be stronger than the quest for freedom. — Kailash Satyarthi

Perfection is an awful prison, which shackles the soul and chains the spirit in shame and despair. — David Foster

I am a king's daughter, And if I cared to care, The moon that has no mistress Would flutter in my hair. No one dares to cherish What I choose to crave. Never have I hungered, For that I did not have I am a kings daughter, And I grow old within The prison of my person, The shackles of my skin. And I would run away And beg from door to door, Just to see your shadow Once, and never more. — Peter S. Beagle

DAILY TRAINING in the Art of Peace allows your inner divinity to shine brighter and brighter. Do not concern yourself with the right and wrong of others. Do not be calculating or act unnaturally. Keep your mind focused on the Art of Peace, and do not criticize other teachers or traditions. The Art of Peace never restrains or shackles anything. It embraces all and purifies everything. — Morihei Ueshiba

Just sleep here." At my sharp look he laughs. "I'll take the floor, and I'll get you to your job on time. I promise."

"You're full of promises." But the thought of sleeping in a soft bed with warm blankets is appealing. And I understand Jannik now. I'm his symbol of hope, his reason to believe that one day he too can throw off the shackles of his family. — Cat Hellisen

A woman must wait for her ovaries to die before she can get her rightful personality back. Post-menstrual is the same as pre-menstrual; I am once again what I was before the age of twelve: a female human being who knows that a month has thirty day, not twenty-five, and who can spend every one of them free of the shackles of that defect of body and mind known as femininity. — Florence King

Just as one might do useful work without fully understanding the job one was engaged in, or even what the point of it was, so the behaviour of devotion still mattered to the all-forgiving God, and just as the habitual performance of a task gradually raised one's skills to something close to perfection, bringing a deeper understanding of the work, so the actions of faith would lead to the state of faith.
Finally, she was shown the filthy, stinking, windowless cell carved into the rock beneath the Refuge where she would be chained, starved and beaten if she did not at least try to accept God's love. She trembled as she looked at the shackles and the flails, and agreed she would do her best. — Iain M. Banks

The old man began to lose heart at this endless return of chains, this rebirth of shackles, this proliferation of suffering, which the more resigned began to accept as proof of the uselessness of all revolt (171-172). — Alejo Carpentier

This nation's impulse is toward the future, and tradition seems more of a shackle to it than an inspiration. — Allan Bloom

Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are. — Rebecca Solnit

Forgiveness is the key that unlocks the door of resentment and the handcuffs of hate. Forgiveness breaks the chains of bitterness and the shackles of selfishness. While dying on the cross, Jesus said, "Forgive them" - the Roman soldiers, the religious leaders, his disciples who had fled in darkness, even you and me who have denied him so many times - "Forgive them, for they know not what they do. — Linda Dillow

I own myself the friend to a very free system of commerce, and hold it as a truth, that commercial shackles are generally unjust, oppressive and impolitic - it is also a truth, that if industry and labour are left to take their own course, they will generally be directed to those objects which are the most productive, and this in a more certain and direct manner than the wisdom of the most enlightened legislature could point out. — James Madison

The sea is emotion incarnate. It loves, hates, and weeps. It defies all attempts to capture it with words and rejects all shackles. No matter what you say about it, there is always that which you can't. — Christopher Paolini

So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men. — Voltaire

A person can carry his own persecutor, his own prison, about with him, Monseigneur. He can - as you know - die of thirst even when he has the clearest water within his reach. To be free ... not to be free ... it is all relative. No one has to drag along more ballast than he wants to and he who allows himself to be bound is a fool. The biggest fools are those who wear shackles of cobwebs and believe themselves to be helpless. — Hella S. Haasse

Fighting for equality is often misunderstood as simply being offered the same terms as men on paper. In many ways we already have that. What we don't have is emancipation: the opportunity to be free of social and external shackles that perpetuate inequality and women's lower position. Women around the world are now demanding more: paid work, a life for their children, but also the right to be listened to, a political voice, direct democracy, and the right to a full civic life. That isn't won by keeping quiet: it's won by physically and psychologically going on strike, by shouting back, and leaning out. — Dawn Foster

My hope is that this volume will make a fresh impact on an entirely new generation of believers who are longing to be free from bondage to others, but have not known how to make that happen. It is gratifying to think that these pages will provide the keys you have been looking for that will unlock those iron bars and release you from the shackles of slavery to others, awakening you to what it means to be truly free. Free in Christ. Free indeed. Free at last. - CHARLES R. SWINDOLL Dallas, Texas — Charles R. Swindoll

Everything, husband, wife, or even the body, is only illusory. These are all shackles of illusion. Unless you can free yourself from these bondages, you will never be able to go to the other shore of the world. — Sarada Devi

Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence began in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau - and for what? It was the wantonness that stirred me. — H.G.Wells

Science and reason liberate us from the shackles of superstition by offering us a framework for understanding our shared humanity. Ultimately, we all have the capacity to treasure life and enrich the world in incalculable ways. — Gad Saad

To become truly human,one has to try an release oneself from the shackles of race,religion and nationality.The quantum of humanism one acquires is inevitably filtered when one limits oneself.-Ashoka Jahnavi Prasad(Kant Lecture,20090) — Ashoka Jahnavi Prasad

We were to write a short essay on one of the works we read in the course and relate it to our lives. I chose the "Allegory of the Cave" in Plato's Republic. I compared my childhood of growing up in a family of migrant workers with the prisoners who were in a dark cave chained to the floor and facing a blank wall. I wrote that, like the captives, my family and other migrant workers were shackled to the fields day after day, seven days a week, week after week, being paid very little and living in tents or old garages that had dirt floors, no indoor plumbing, no electricity. I described how the daily struggle to simply put food on our tables kept us from breaking the shackles, from turning our lives around. I explained that faith and hope for a better life kept us going. I identified with the prisoner who managed to escape and with his sense of obligation to return to the cave and help others break free. — Francisco Jimenez

They say that life is an accident, driven by sexual desire, that the universe has no moral order, no truth, no God.

Driven by insatiable lusts, drunk on the arrogance of power, hypocritical, deluded, their actions foul with self-seeking, tormented by a vast anxiety that continues until their death, convinced that the gratification of desire is life's sole aim, bound by a hundred shackles of hope, enslaved by their greed, they squander their time dishonestly piling up mountains of wealth.

"Today I got this desire, and tomorrow I will get that one; all these riches are mine, and soon I will have even more. Already I have killed these enemies, and soon I will kill the rest. I am the lord, the enjoyer, successful, happy, and strong, noble, and rich, and famous. Who on earth is my equal? — Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa