Il est bien malaisé (puisqu’il faut enfin m’expliquer) d’ôter à des insensés des chaînes qu’ils révèrent.
Le dîner du comte de Boulainvilliers (1767): Troisième Entretien
Citas
Il est bien malaisé (puisqu’il faut enfin m’expliquer) d’ôter à des insensés des chaînes qu’ils révèrent.
“Man is created free, and is free,
Though he be born in chains.”
Die Worte des Glaubens (The Word of the Faithful), st. 2 (1797)
"Eliminating Poverty Through Market-Based Social Entrepreneurship" in Global Urban Development Magazine (May 2005) http://www.globalurban.org/Issue1PIMag05/Yunus%20article.htm
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
“No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.”
As quoted in Sculpting in Time (1996), by Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 56
Speech in the Plait Hall, Luton (12 October 1904), quoted in The Times (13 October 1904), p. 9
Early political career
“Even that has its reason; it is often better to be in chains than to be free.”
Source: The Trial (1920), Ch. 8
Vorkosigan Saga, Borders of Infinity (1989)
Context: The loonies who sought a glorious death in battle found it very early on. This rapidly cleared the chain of command of the accumulated fools. The survivors were those who learned to fight dirty, and live, and fight another day, and win, and win, and win, and for whom nothing, not comfort, or security, not family or friends or their immortal souls, was more important than winning. Dead men are losers by definition. Survival and victory. They weren't supermen, or immune to pain. They sweated in confusion and darkness. And … they won.
This text is commentary (not a quotation of Dewey) that was added to this page at [//en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=John_Dewey&diff=prev&oldid=896209 05:36, 2 February 2009 (UTC)]; the text was later removed from this page but not before being misattributed to Dewey on several web sites, including in a sermon given at an Episcopal church https://web.archive.org/web/20160304201732/http://www.trinitywhitinsville.org/sermons/theprudenceofgenerosity.html. The statement was commenting on a quotation from Democracy and Education (1916): "The first step in freeing men from external chains was to emancipate them from the internal chains of false beliefs and ideals."
Misattributed
1940s, "Autobiographical Notes" (1949)
Context: It is quite clear to me that the religious paradise of youth, which was thus lost, was a first attempt to free myself from the chains of the "merely-personal," from an existence which is dominated by wishes, hopes and primitive feelings. Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation, and I soon noticed that many a man whom I had learned to esteem and to admire had found inner freedom and security in devoted occupation with it. The mental grasp of this extrapersonal world within the frame of the given possibilites swam as highest aim half consciously and half unconsciously before my mind's eye. Similarly motivated men of the present and of the past, as well as the insights which they had achieved, were the friends which could not be lost. The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has proved itself as trustworthy, and I have never regretted having chosen it.
