Quotes about cage
page 3

“The reason why so few marriages are happy is because young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

Thoughts on Various Subjects from Miscellanies (1711-1726)

Marriage, Happiness, Time

“Yeah, I support my troops
They wave black flags
They wear black masks
All the roads are closed
Smoke is rising from the fields
The monsters left their cages
An angel set them free.”

Tom Morello (1964) American guitarist and singer-songwriter

Flesh Shapes The Day.
Lyrics

Angels, Support

“If we are ready to tear down the walls that confine us, break the cage that imprisons us, we will discover what our wings are for.”

Michael Elmore-Meegan (1959) British humanitarian

All Will be Well (2004)

Tear

“You know, in my experience,” said Kareem, caging his fingers and drawing out his words, “the jokers…who talk the most about ‘playing the race card’…are the people who own all the diamonds…who’ve picked up the clubs…to beat down the spades…because they’ve got no heart.”

Malcolm Azania book From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain

Source: From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain (2007), Chapter 1 “Operation: Cooperation!” (p. 14)

People, Heart, Drawing

“My closing statement to the senate and the council is…youth need art this truth is, not hard to swallow. I see many artistic people wallow in sorrow off belief. They aren't good enough to be. Give us a chance let us write our own histories. In a world conforming us instead of conforming for us. Kids ain't dumb just bored of the same old junk. Formulated highlight text, define learning. Is it confined to enclosed spaces eight hours a day? If it is I know why the caged bird sings.”

Marcus Orelias (1993) American actor, rapper, songwriter, author and entrepreneur

Fate
20s A Difficult Age (2017)

People, Truth, Youth, World

“Poor captive bird! Who, from thy narrow cage,
Pourest such music, that it might assuage
The rugged hearts of those who prisoned thee,
Were they not deaf to all sweet melody.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Epipsychidion

Source: Epipsychidion (1821), l. 9

Music, Bird, Heart

“The difference between a brave man and a coward is a coward thinks twice before jumping in the cage with a lion. The brave man doesn't know what a lion is. He just thinks he does.”

Charles Bukowski book Notes of a Dirty Old Man

Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969)

Thinking

“I met him Cummingham around 1953 after a performance I saw. He was teaching and making dances for his company and was already working with John Cage. What interested me initially wasn't just the movement but also the music he worked with, which was unfamiliar to me... Later Bob Rauschenberg had been doing sets and costumes for the Cunningham Company... I can't say exactly how, but for a period of time, Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg, and I saw each other frequently and exchanged ideas. John [Cage] was very interested in presenting his ideas to other people, so it was impossible to be around and not to learn... He could apply his ideas on space and time to painting, or music or architecture... I don't have a clear sense of cause and effect in my painting, but it is probably there.”

Jasper Johns (1930) American artist

Jasper Johns, by Bryan Robertson and Tim Marlow, Tate, in 'The Art Magazine', London, Winter 1993, pp. 40, 47
1990s

People, Music, Idea, Sense

“In the late 1950s, experiments such as the cybernetic sculptures of Nicolas Schöffer or the programmatic music compositions of John Cage and Iannis Xenakis transposed systems theory from the sciences to the arts. By the 1960s, artists as diverse as Roy Ascott, Hans Haacke, Robert Morris, Sonia Sheridan, and Stephen Willats were breaking with accepted aesthetics to embrace open systems that emphasized organism over mechanism, dynamic processes of interaction among elements, and the observer’s role as an inextricable part of the system. Jack Burnham’s 1968 Artforum essay “Systems Aesthetics” and his 1970 “Software” exhibition marked the high point of systems-based art until its resurgence in the changed conditions of the twenty-first century.”

Edward A. Shanken (1964) American art historian

Edward A. Shanken. Systems https://books.google.nl/books?id=Ip_0rQEACAAJ, 2015. Overview

Art, Music, Science, Change

“He bought a bird in its own cage, with a sheet over it so no one could see the bird and the bird couldn't see anyone, and the whole thing was a secret bird… Everything he said was tinged with the unreadability of someone who would bring a bird on cruise ship.”

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Adverbs (2006), Often

Secret, Bird

“How strong the expression, "She is become the habitation of demons, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird." How true it is, that the most execrable of society seek and wear the garb of Christian profession and ceremonialism, in some of the various quarters (sects) of Babylon. Every impure principle and doctrine, somehow and somewhere, finds representation in her. And she is a "cage" which holds securely not only the Lord's meek and gentle doves, but also many unclean and hateful birds. Of all the defaulters, and deceivers of men and of women, how many are professedly members of Christ's Church! and how many even use their profession as a cloak under which to forward evil schemes! It is well known that a majority of even the most brutal criminals executed die in the Roman Catholic communion.”

Charles Taze Russell (1852–1916) Founder of the Bible Student Movement

Source: Milennial Dawn, Vol. III: Thy Kingdom Come (1891), p. 162.

Women, Men, Hate, Bird

“There are people who love birds so much they free them. There are others who love them so much they cage them.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

Volume 3, Ch. 4
Fiction, The Book of the Long Sun (1993–1996)

Love, People, Bird

“But I do think we need to explore the commitment problem, which has caused many women to mistakenly conclude that men, as a group, have the emotional maturity of hamsters. This is not the case. A hamster is MUCH more capable of making a lasting commitment to a woman, especially if she gives it those little food pellets. Whereas a guy, in a relationship, will consume the pellets of companionship, and he will run on the exercise wheel of lust; but as soon as he senses that the door of commitment is about to close and trap him in the wire cage of true intimacy, he'll squirm out, scamper across the kitchen floor of uncertainty and hide under the refrigerator of Non-Readiness.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

Column, August 18, 1991
Columns and articles

Women, Men, Food, Guy

“The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement.”

Germaine Greer (1939) Australian feminist author

Article "Abortion", The Sunday Times, 21 May 1972

Love, Bird, Singing

“And you can cage the songbird,
But you can't make her sing.
And you can trap the free bird,
But you'll have to clip her wings.
`Cause she'll soar like a hawk when she flies,
But she'll dive like an eagle when she dies.”

Elton John (1947) English rock singer-songwriter, composer and pianist

Cage the Songbird, written by Elton John, Bernie Taupin, and Davey Johnstone
Song lyrics, Blue Moves (1976)

Bird, Singing

“If I could act like
This was my real life,
And not some cage where I've been placed,
Well then, I could tell you
The truth like I used to
And not be afraid of sounding fake.”

Conor Oberst (1980) American musician

False Advertising
Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (2002)

Life, Truth

“[Robert Lowell] is a poet of both Will and Imagination, but his Will is always seizing his Imagination by the shoulders and saying to it in a grating voice: “Don’t sit there fooling around; get to work!” — and his poor Imagination gets tense all over and begins to revolve determinedly and familiarly, like a squirrel in a squirrel-cage. Goethe talked about the half-somnambulistic state of the poet; but Mr. Lowell too often is either having a nightmare or else is wide awake gritting his teeth and working away at All The Things He Does Best. Cocteau said to poets: Learn what you can do and then don’t do it; and this is so—we do it enough without trying. As a poet Mr. Lowell sometimes doesn’t have enough trust in God and tries to do everything himself: he proposes and disposes — and this helps to give a certain monotony to his work.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Three Books”, p. 236
Poetry and the Age (1953)

God, Fools, Imagination, Learning

“It was the ultimate possible statement of powerlessness and desperation [Richter is referring to w:John Cage's famous 'Lecture on Nothing']. Nothing, absolutely nothing left, no figures, no color, nothing. Then you realize after you've painted three of them that one's better than the others and you ask yourself why is that. When I see eight pictures together I no longer feel that they're sad, or if so, they're sad in a pleasant way.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 95, note 28

Sadness, Color, Way, Feeling

“Animals in zoos (we are told) believe that their bars protect them. We Americans have forged our own bars, built our own cage, and live in it more or less content as long as someone feeds us.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009), afterword to "Petting Zoo", p. 432
Nonfiction

Animals

“As he silently approached the last float, a latticework ball of reeds, he offered an unspoken prayer to He Who Always Steps on Sand that even now the little bottom-walkers were pushing and shoving their way into the cage below. Because of his unusual education, which included a year living on Perdruin—unheard of for a Wrannaman—Tiamak did not really believe in He Who Always Steps on Sand anymore, but he still held a fondness for him, such as might be felt for a senile grandfather who often tumbled down from the house, but once brought nuts and carved toys. Besides, it never hurt to pray, even if one did not believe in the object of prayer. It helped to compose the mind, and, at the very least, it impressed others.”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, The Dragonbone Chair (1988), Chapter 28, “Drums of Ice” (p. 447).

Education, Way, Help, Hurt

“Has it never occurred to us, when surrounded by sorrows, that they may be sent to us only for our instruction, as we darken the cages of birds when we wish to teach them to sing?”

Jean Paul (1763–1825) German novelist

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 556.

Bird, Singing

“We lived like that “Happy Family“ you sometimes see in traveling zoos: a lion caged with a lamb. It is a startling exhibit but the lamb has to be replaced frequently.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Have Space Suit—Will Travel

Source: Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958), Chapter 7

Happiness, Family, Travel

“By contemplation I swear,
By the beginning of speech,
By the flight of a dove from the mind.
A word is in the cage”

Sohrab Sepehri (1928–1980) Iranian poet and painter

From We Are Nothing But a Gaze (Ma Heech, Ma Negah); cited in: Bahiyeh Afnan Shahid (2013) Sohrab Sepehri: A Selection of Poems from the Eight, p. 16.

“I'm especially interested in the music of John Cage... I would like to do some experimenting with the relationship between his freeform sound and free-form art.”

Jasper Johns (1930) American artist

Quote of Johns, from: John Adds Plaster Casts To Focus Target Paintings, Donald Key, Milwaukee Journal, 19 June 1960, pt. 5, p. 6
1960s

Art, Music

“In his fancy, office was poison; it killed — body and soul — physically and socially. Office was more poisonous than priestcraft or pedagogy in proportion as it held more power; but the poison he complained of was not ambition; he shared none of Cardinal Wolsey's belated penitence for that healthy stimulant, as he had shared none of the fruits; his poison was that of the will — the distortion of sight — the warping of mind — the degradation of tissue — the coarsening of taste — the narrowing of sympathy to the emotions of a caged rat.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Soul

“I know I get up people's noses," "Everyone wants to pigeonhole you. Early on in my career I somehow got labelled 'Bach, John Cage and a bit of jazz'. But the fact that I love to play Beethoven, too, really infuriates people. It doesn't fit. They can't make sense of it. The received wisdom is that you can't possibly do all these things without it sounding terrible or crass or just plain wrong.”

Joanna MacGregor (1959) British musician

Musician's life

Love, Wisdom, People, Sense

“You are not necessarily depriving him of his liberty, for territory is a form of natural cage and the word "liberty" does not have the same connotation for an animal as it does for a chest-beating liberal homo sapiens, who can afford the luxury of abstract ideas. What you are, in fact, doing is much more important, you are taking away his territory, so you must take great care to provide him with an adequate substitute, or you will get a bored, sick or dead animal on your hands.
The thing that turns a cage into a territory may be something quite slight, but it need not be size. It might be the shape of the cage, the number of branches or the lack of them, the absence or presence of a pond, a patch of sand, a chunk of log, which could make all the difference. Such a detail, trivial to the uninformed visitor, can help the animal consider this area his territory, rather than simply a place where he ekes out his existence. As I say it is not necessarily size which is of prime importance. This is where people who criticise zoos go wrong, for they generally have little idea what circumscribed lives most animals lead.”

Gerald Durrell (1925–1995) naturalist, zookeeper, conservationist, author and television presenter

The Stationary Ark (1976)

People, Idea, Nature, Help

“Think, for a moment, of a cheetah, a sleek, beautiful animal, one of the fastest on earth, which roams freely on the savannas of Africa. In its natural habitat, it is a magnificent animal, almost a work of art, unsurpassed in speedor grace by any other animal. Now, think of a cheetah that has been captured and thrown into a miserable cage in a zoo. It has lost its original grace and beauty, and is put on display for our amusement. We see only the broken spirit of the cheetah in the cage, not its original power and elegance. The cheetah can be compared to the laws of physics, which are beautiful in their natural setting. The natural habitat of the laws of physics is higher-dimensional space-time. However, we can only measure the laws of physics when they have been broken and placed on display in a cage, which is our three-dimensional laboratory. We can only see the cheetah when its grace and beauty have been stripped away.”

Peter Freund (1936–2018) American physicist

As quoted by Michio Kaku in Hyperspace (Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 12. ISBN 0-385-47705-8.

Law, Beauty, Art, Nature

“We have already discovered two species that are very intelligent but technically less advanced than us — the common chimpanzee and pygmy chimpanzee. Has our response been to sit down and try to communicate with them? Of course not. Instead we shoot them, stuff them, dissect them, cut off their hands for trophies, put them on exhibit in cages, inject them with AIDS virus as a medical experiment, and destroy or take over their habitat. That response was predictable, because human explorers who discovered technically less advanced humans also regularly responded by shooting them, decimating their populations with new diseases, and destroying or taking over their habitat. Any advanced extraterrestrials who discovered us would surely treat us in the same way…If there really are any radio civilizations within listening distance of us, then for heaven's sake let's turn off our own transmitters and try to escape detection, or we are doomed.”

Jared Diamond book The Third Chimpanzee

The Third Chimpanzee (1991)
The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (1991)

Disease, Way, Intelligence, Communication

“To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apartheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks.”

Peter Singer book Animal Liberation

Source: Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals (1975), Ch. 4: Becoming a Vegetarian

Lie, Dogs, Freedom, Baby

“A forest bird never wants a cage.”

Henrik Ibsen The Master Builder

Hilda, Act III
The Master Builder (1892)

Bird

“Our Nation has had a long and unfortunate history of sex discrimination, rationalized by an attitude of 'romantic paternalism' which, in practical effect, put women, not on a pedestal, but in a cage.”

William J. Brennan (1906–1997) American judge

Writing for the court, Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U.S. 677 (1973).

Women, Sex, History

“It is as natural and as right for a young man to be imprudent and exaggerated, to live in swoops and circles, and beat about his cage like any other wild thing newly captured, as it is for old men to turn gray, or mothers to love their offspring, or heroes to die for something worthier than their lives.”

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer

Crabbed Age and Youth.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)

Love, Men, Nature

“Cage took it to work in his way of making compositions then; and he used the idea of 64—the number of the hexagrams —to say that you had 64, for example, sounds; then you could cast, by chance, to find which sound first appeared, cast again, to say which sound came second, cast again, so that it's done by, in that sense, chance operations. Instead of finding out what you think should follow—say a particular sound—what did the I Ching suggest? Well, I took this also for dance.”

Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) American dancer

Merce Cunningham, A Lifetime of Dance, 2000

Way, Idea, Thinking, Sense

“Crowded fifty to a room, There's too many rats in this cage of the world, And the women know their place, They sit home and write letters, And when they visit once a year, Well they both just sit there and stare, Gotta keep bars in between us, See how we are”

John Doe (1954) American singer, songwriter, actor, poet, guitarist and bass player

Song lyrics, See How We Are (1987), See How We Are

Women, World, Home

“Ideas are free. But while the author confines them to his study, they are like birds in a cage, which none but he can have a right to let fly : for till he thinks proper to emancipate them, they are under his own dominion.”

Joseph Yates (judge) (1722–1770) English barrister and judge

4 Burr. Part IV., 2379.
Dissenting in Millar v Taylor (1769)

Idea, Bird, Thinking, Study

“John Cage and I became interested in the use of chance in the 50's. I think one of the very primary things that happened then was the publication of the "I Ching," the Chinese book of changes, from which you can cast your fortune: the hexagrams.”

Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) American dancer

Merce Cunningham, A Lifetime of Dance, 2000

Books, Thinking, Change, Chance

“Sometimes captured from the great arboreal freedom of their jungle homes, monkeys are closely confined in cages only three or four feet square. … They can never sit or lie down on a flat, soft or yielding surface. Little wonder that by the time they are needed for the knife or the needle they are so crazed or inert that they are no longer representative examples of animal life. Psychologists who study the behaviour of thousands of such creatures annually, rarely make allowances for the fact that their pathetic subjects have been so deprived that they have become more like monsters than animals. Many people who have experienced close affectionate relationships with individuals of other species testify to the considerable potential for emotional and intellectual development that animals have. When properly cared for a pet dog or cat can develop great subtleties of behaviour that the laboratory animal never shows. Those who have been fortunate enough to closely observe unfrightened animals living in the wild are often struck by the complexity and richness of the life they lead. These positive pleasures the laboratory animal never knows; for him the same four white walls and the smell of disinfectant.”

Richard D. Ryder (1940) British psychologist

Experiments on Animals (1971)

Life, People, Pleasure, Lie

“[A] number of points are worth making at once [that challenge Foucault’s Madness and Civilization]: (1) There is ample evidence of medieval cruelty towards the insane; (2) In the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the mad were already confined, to cells, jails or even cages; (3) ‘dialogue’ or no ‘dialogue’, even madness during those times was frequently connected with sin -- even in the Ship of Fools mythology; and, to that extent, it was regarded in a far less benevolent light than suggested by Foucault (pre-modern minds accepted the reality of madness -- ‘madness as a part of truth’ -- just as they accepted the reality of sin; but this does not mean they valued madness, any more than sin; (4) as Martin Schrenk (himself a severe critic Foucault) has shown, early modern madhouses developed from medieval hospitals and monasteries rather than as reopened leprosaria; (5) the Great Confinement was primarily aimed not at deviance but at poverty -- criminal poverty, crazy poverty or just plain poverty; the notion that it heralded (in the name of the rising bourgeoise) a moral segregation does not bear close scrutiny; (6) at any rate, as stressed by Klaus Doerner, another of critic of Foucault (Madmen and the Bourgeoisie, 1969), that there was no uniform state-controlled confinement: the English and German patterns, for example, strayed greatly from the Louis Quatorzian Grand Renfermement; (7) Foucault’s periodization seems to me amiss. By the late eighteenths century, confinement of the poor was generally deemed a failure; but it is then that confinement of the mad really went ahead, as so conclusively shown in statistics concerning England, France, and the United States; (8) Tuke and Pinel did not ‘invent’ mental illness. Rather, they owe much to prior therapies and often relied also on their methods; (9) moreover, in nineetenth-century England moral treatment was not that central in the medicalization of madness. Far from it: as shown by Andrew Scull, physicians saw Tukean moral therapy as a lay threat to their art, and strove to avoid it or adapt it to their own practice. Once more, Foucault’s epochal monoliths crumble before the contradictory wealth of the historical evidence.”

José Guilherme Merquior book Foucault

Source: Foucault (1985), pp. 28-29

Truth, Age, Fools, Art

“The real slums are another matter. The bad parts of Tondo are as bad as any place I've seen, ancient, filthy houses swarmed with the poor and stinking of sewage and trash. But there are worse parts— squatter areas where people live under cardboard, in shipping crates, behind tacked-up newspapers. Dad would march you straight to the basement with a hairbrush in his hand if he caught you keeping your hamster cage like this.”

P. J. O'Rourke book Republican Party Reptile

Republican Party Reptile (1987)

People, Parting, Housing

“The dictator is the one animal who needs to be caged.”

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1928–1979) Fourth President and ninth Prime Minister of Pakistan

Source: Letter to his daughter (1978), p. 63.
Context: Tin-pot dictators have ravaged Asia, Latin America and Africa. In the aftermath, they have done more to promote communism than the works of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Mao. They are the worst tyrants of the post-colonial period. They have destroyed time-honoured institutions and treated their people like animals. They have caused internal divisions and external confusion. The dictator is the one animal who needs to be caged. He betrays his profession and his constitution. He betrays the people and destroys human values. He destroys culture. He binds the youth. He makes the structure collapse. He rules by fluke and freak. He is the scourge and the ogre. He is a leper. Anyone who touches him also becomes a leper. He is the upstart who is devoid of ideals and ideology. Not a single one of them has made a moment's contribution to history.

Animals

“Long I lived checked by the bars of a cage;
Now I have turned again to Nature and Freedom.”

Tao Yuanming (365–427) Chinese poet

"Returning to the Fields"
Arthur Waley, Translations from the Chinese (1941), p. 90
Variant translation:
Young I was witless in the world's affairs,
My nature wildness and hills prefers;
By mishap fallen into mundane snares,
Once I had left I wasted thirty years.
Birds in the cage long for their wonted woods,
Fish in the pool for former rivers yearn.
I clear the wildness that stretches south,
Hiding my defects homeward I return.
Ten acres built with scattered house square,
Beside the thatched huts eight or nine in all;
The elms and willows shade the hindmost eaves,
While peach and pear-trees spread before the hall.
While smoke form nearby huts hangs in the breeze;
A dog is barking in the alley deep;
A cock crows from the chump of mulberry trees.
Within my courtyard all is clear of dust,
Where tranquil in my leisure I remain.
Long have I been imprisoned in the cage;
Now back to Nature I return again.
"Returning to my Farm Young" (translation by Andrew Boyd)
Context: When I was young, I was out of tune with the herd,
[[File:Chen Hongshou Portrait von Tao-Qian. JPG|thumb|Long I lived checked by the bars of a cage;
Now I have turned again to Nature and Freedom. ]] My only love was for the hills and mountains.
Unwitting I fell into the Web of World's dust,
And was not free until my thirtieth year.
The migrant bird longs for the old wood;
The fish in the tank thinks of its native pool.
I had rescued from wildness a patch of the Southern Moor
And, still rustic, I returned to field and garden.
My ground covers no more than ten acres;
My thatched cottage has eight or nine rooms.
Elms and willows cluster by the eaves;
Peach trees and plum trees grow before the Hall.
Hazy, hazy the distant hamlets of men;
Steady the smoke that hangs over cottage roofs.
A dog barks somewhere in the deep lanes,
A cock crows at the top of the mulberry tree.
At gate and courtyard—no murmur of the World's dust;
In the empty rooms—leisure and deep stillness.
Long I lived checked by the bars of a cage;
Now I have turned again to Nature and Freedom.

Nature, Freedom

“I have now decided to disband the Order, as I happen to be its Head. You can form other organizations and expect someone else. With that I am not concerned, nor with creating new cages, new decorations for those cages. My only concern is to set men absolutely, unconditionally free.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

1920s, Truth is a Pathless Land (1929)
Context: You are accustomed to being told how far you have advanced, what is your spiritual status. How childish! Who but yourself can tell you if you are beautiful or ugly within? Who but yourself can tell you if you are incorruptible? You are not serious in these things.
But those who really desire to understand, who are looking to find that which is eternal, without beginning and without an end, will walk together with a greater intensity, will be a danger to everything that is unessential, to unrealities, to shadows. And they will concentrate, they will become the flame, because they understand. Such a body we must create, and that is my purpose. Because of that real understanding there will be true friendship. Because of that true friendship – which you do not seem to know – there will be real cooperation on the part of each one. And this not because of authority, not because of salvation, not because of immolation for a cause, but because you really understand, and hence are capable of living in the eternal. This is a greater thing than all pleasure, than all sacrifice.
So these are some of the reasons why, after careful consideration for two years, I have made this decision. It is not from a momentary impulse. I have not been persuaded to it by anyone. I am not persuaded in such things. For two years I have been thinking about this, slowly, carefully, patiently, and I have now decided to disband the Order, as I happen to be its Head. You can form other organizations and expect someone else. With that I am not concerned, nor with creating new cages, new decorations for those cages. My only concern is to set men absolutely, unconditionally free.

Men

“The anti-democratic thrust of opinion in what are called democratic societies is really ferocious. And for good reason. Because the freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow.”

Noam Chomsky book Class Warfare

Quotes 1990s, 1995-1999, Class Warfare, 1995
Context: Mass education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose. And don't think people didn't know it. They knew it and they fought against it. There was a lot of resistance to mass education for exactly that reason. It was also understood by the elites. Emerson once said something about how we're educating them to keep them from our throats. If you don't educate them, what we call "education," they're going to take control -- "they" being what Alexander Hamilton called the "great beast," namely the people. The anti-democratic thrust of opinion in what are called democratic societies is really ferocious. And for good reason. Because the freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow.

“Darl is our brother, our brother Darl. Our brother Darl in a cage in Jackson where, his grimed hands lying lightly in the quiet interstices, looking out he foams.”

William Faulkner book As I Lay Dying

As I Lay Dying (1930)

Lying

“Certainly youth of color, particularly those in ghetto communities, find themselves born into the cage. They are born into a community in which the rules, laws, policies, structures of their lives virtually guarantee that they will remain trapped for life…”

Michelle Alexander (1967) American lawyer, civil rights activist and writer

On ghetto youth being caged even at birth in “Schools and the New Jim Crow: An Interview With Michelle Alexander” https://truthout.org/articles/schools-and-the-new-jim-crow-an-interview-with-michelle-alexander/ in Truthout (2013 Jun 4)

Life, Youth, Law, Color

“Apparently Jordan and Peter Andre are fighting each other over custody of Harvey, well eventually one of them’ll lose and have to keep him. I have a theory that Jordan married a cage fighter cause she needed someone strong enough to stop Harvey from fucking her.”

Frankie Boyle (1972) Scottish comedian

Frankie Boyle's Tramadol Nights (2010)

Strong, Fight