Quotes about chain (717 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Logistics is the ball and chain of armored warfare.”

Heinz Guderian (1888–1954) German general

As quoted in Sword Point (1988) by Harold Coyle, p. 141

“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

As is often the case, this quote appears to be something Luxemburg could have said or written, but searches for a source have been unsuccessful. While Luxemburg often used metaphors of breaking or shattering chains, this, apparently, is not one of them. See: https://librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com/2013/07/06/reference-desk-unanswered-questions/

Moving On

“I can’t comment on Soundgarden because I know them personally and I really like them a lot, but I have strong feelings towards Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains and bands like that. They’re obviously just corporate puppets that are just trying to jump on the alternative bandwagon - and we are being lumped into that category.”

Kurt Cobain (1967–1994) American musician and artist

As quoted in Flipside (1992-03).
Interviews (1989-1994), Print

Feeling , Strong , Personality

“But let's not talk of love or chains and things we can't untie,
your eyes are soft with sorrow,
Hey, that's no way to say goodbye.”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

"Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye" · Duet with Judy Collins on Soundstage (January 1976) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVJImYNGqwk
Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967)
Context: I loved you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm,
Your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm,
Yes many loved before us, I know that we are not new,
In city and in forest they smiled like me and you,
But let's not talk of love or chains and things we can't untie,
your eyes are soft with sorrow,
Hey, that's no way to say goodbye.

Love , Way

“That's what real love amounts to - letting a person be what he really is. Most people love you for who you pretend to be. To keep their love, you keep pretending - performing. You get to love your pretence. It's true, we're locked in an image, an act - and the sad thing is, people get so used to their image, they grow attached to their masks. They love their chains. They forget all about who they really are. And if you try to remind them, they hate you for it, they feel like you're trying to steal their most precious possession.”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

Love , Hate , People , Sadness

“Women make up one half of society. Our society will remain backward and in chains unless its women are liberated, enlightened and educated.”

Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) Iraqi politician and President

" Women: One Half of Our Society http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Women_-_One_half_of_our_society" (1981).
Source: The Revolution and Woman in Iraq
Context: The complete emancipation of women from the ties which held them back in the past, during the ages of despotism and ignorance, is a basic aim of the Party and the Revolution. Women make up one half of society. Our society will remain backward and in chains unless its women are liberated, enlightened and educated.

Women , Education

“The chain of young life is broken,
The journey is ended, the hour has struck, it is time to leave,
Time to go where there is no future,
No past, no eternity, no years;
Where there are no expectations, no passions,
No bitter tears, no fame, no honour;
Where memory sleeps deeply
And the heart in its narrow coffin home
Does not feel the worm gnawing it.”

Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841) Russian writer, poet and painter

"Death" (1830 or 1831)
Poems

Life , Feeling , Home , Tear

“You have locked the chain around the heart that loves you; for the perpetual search for love remains hollow.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

1976

Love , Making love , Heart , Search

“We are the gleam of invinite,
the breath of light,
the spark of life,
the chain of being,
the circle of the spheres,
the scale of creation,
the rise and fall.
We are what we are
and we are not.
We are the soul in all.”

Alexis Karpouzos (1967)

Source: https://hellopoetry.com/alexis-karpouzos/

Light , Soul , Life

“We are the gleam of invinite,
the breath of light,
the spark of life,
the chain of being,
the circle of the spheres,
the scale of creation,
the rise and fall.
We are what we are
and we are not.
We are the soul in all.”

Alexis Karpouzos (1967)

Source: https://hellopoetry.com/alexis-karpouzos/

Light , Soul , Life

“I am in chains. Don't touch my chains.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

“We who are immortal, we are chained to this life by a chain of gold, and we dare not sever it for fear of what lies beyond the drop.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Prince

Source: Clockwork Prince

Life , Fear

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Genevan philosopher

“You are brave, kicking a chained prisoner. They must sing heroic ballads about you on winter nights!" (Alanna)”

Tamora Pierce (1954) American writer of fantasy novels for children

Winter , Singing , Night

“Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Genevan philosopher

Thinking

“No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Bird

“It seemed queer, in the barber's shop, to see the Anarchist notice still on the wall, explaining that tips were prohibited. "The Revolution has struck off our chains," the notice said. I felt like telling the barbers that their chains would soon be back on again if they didn't look out.”

George Orwell book Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia (1938)

“There is no man, let him be aware of it or not, who is not a combatant in this hot contest; no one who does not take an active part in the responsibility of the defeat or victory. The prisoner in his chains and the king on his throne, the poor and the rich, the healthy and the infirm, the wise and the ignorant, the captive and the free, the old man and the child, the civilized and the savage, share equally in the combat. Every word that is pronounced, is either inspired by God or by the world, and necessarily proclaims, implicitly or explicitly, but always clearly, the glory of the one or the triumph of the other. In this singular warfare we all fight through forced enlistment; here the system of substitutes or volunteers finds no place. In it is unknown the exception of sex or age; here no attention is paid to him who says, I am the son of a poor widow; nor to the mother of the paralytic, nor to the wife of the cripple. In this warfare all men born of woman are soldiers.
And don’t tell me you don’t wish to fight; for the moment you tell me that, you are already fighting; nor that you don’t know which side to join, for while you are saying that, you have already joined a side; nor that you wish to remain neutral; for while you are thinking to be so, you are so no longer; nor that you want to be indifferent; for I will laugh at you, because on pronouncing that word you have chosen your party. Don’t tire yourself in seeking a place of security against the chances of war, for you tire yourself in vain; that war is extended as far as space, and prolonged through all time. In eternity alone, the country of the just, can you find rest, because there alone there is no combat. But do not imagine, however, that the gates of eternity shall be opened for you, unless you first show the wounds you bear; those gates are only opened for those who gloriously fought here the battles of the Lord, and were, like the Lord, crucified.”

Juan Donoso Cortés (1809–1853) Spanish author, political theorist and diplomat

Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism (1879)

Men , God , War , Age

“I have always disbelieved that Sicilian saying about revenge being a dish best served cold. I feel that--don't you?--when I see blinking, quivering octogenarian Nazi war criminals being led away in chains. Why not then? It's too late now. I want to see them taken back in time and punished then… Blame, certainly, is a dish only edible when served fresh and warm. Old blames, grudges and scores congeal and curdle and cause the most terrible indigestion.”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

1990s, Moab is My Washpot (autobiography, 1997)

War , Feeling , Revenge , Time

“I protest against every order with which some authority may feel pleased on the basis of some alleged necessity to over-rule my free will. Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of government.”

Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) French politician, mutualist philosopher, economist, and socialist

"The Authority Principle" in No Gods, No Masters : An Anthology of Anarchism (1980) Daniel Guérin, as translated by Paul Sharkey (1998), p. 90
Context: I stand ready to negotiate, but I want no part of laws: I acknowledge none; I protest against every order with which some authority may feel pleased on the basis of some alleged necessity to over-rule my free will. Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of government.

Law , Feeling , Fish

“For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

1990s, Long Walk to Freedom (1995)
Context: It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man's freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else's freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.
When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both. Some say that has now been achieved. But I know that that is not the case. The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.

Way , Freedom

“When I am dead, bury me
In my beloved Ukraine,
My tomb upon a grave mound high
Amid the spreading plain,
So that the fields, the boundless steppes,
The Dnieper's plunging shore
My eyes could see, my ears could hear
The mighty river roar.

When from Ukraine the Dnieper bears
Into the deep blue sea
The blood of foes… then will I leave
These hills and fertile fields --
I'll leave them all and fly away
To the abode of God,
And then I'll pray…. But until that day
I know nothing of God.

Oh bury me, then rise ye up
And break your heavy chains
And water with the tyrants' blood
The freedom you have gained.
And in the great new family,
The family of the free,
With softly spoken, kindly word
Remember also me.”

Taras Shevchenko Testamento

Taras Shevchenko Zapovit, 1845 (Shevchenko's "Testament"), Translated by John Weir, Toronto, 1961; Online at

God , Family , Freedom , Water

“Verona is full of pictures which have never been painted. Every step excites emotion and gives rise to unaffected reflection. In the course of a short stroll, you may pass by a Roman amphitheatre, still used, then the castle of some petty prince of the Middle Ages, and while you are contrasting the sublime elevation of antiquity with the heterogeneous palace of a Scaliger your eyes light on a gate of Oriental appearance and fantastic ornament... The illusion is perfect, the eye rests with pain on the passing citizens in their modern costumes; you look for black velvets and gold chains, white feathers and red stockings.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Source: Letter to Isaac Disraeli (September 1826), quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume I. 1804–1859 (1929), p. 107

Painting , Perfection , Pain , Light

“It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Speech in the House of Commons, February 27, 1945 "Crimea Conference" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1945/feb/27/crimea-conference#column_1294; in The Second World War, Volume VI: Triumph and Tragedy (1954), Chapter XXIII – Yalta: Finale.
The Second World War (1939–1945)

Time

“Forgiveness is the key that unlocks the door of resentment and the handcuffs of hatred. It is a power that breaks the chains of bitterness and the shackles of selfishness.”

Corrie ten Boom (1892–1983) Dutch resistance hero and writer

Source: Clippings from My Notebook

Forgiveness , Selfishness

“The chains of habit are generally too small to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.”

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) English playwright and poet

Strong

“So she was considering in her own mind… whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up & picking the daisies…”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

Source: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

Pleasure

“You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded woman… I have been traveling over the old world during the last few years and have found new food for thought. What power is it that makes the Hindoo woman burn herself upon the funeral pyre of her husband? Her religion. What holds the Turkish woman in the harem? Her religion. By what power do the Mormons perpetuate their system of polygamy? By their religion/ Man, of himself, could not do this; but when he declares, 'Thus saith the Lord,' of course he can do it. So long as ministers stand up and tell us Christ is the head of the church, so is man the head of woman, how are we to break the chains which have held women down through the ages? You Christian women look at the Hindoo, the Turkish, the Mormon women, and wonder how they can be held in such bondage…

Now I ask you if our religion teaches the dignity of woman? It teaches us the abominable idea of the sixth century--Augustine's idea--that motherhood is a curse; that woman is the author of sin, and is most corrupt. Can we ever cultivate any proper sense of self-respect as long as women take such sentiments from the mouths of the priesthood?”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) Suffragist and Women's Rights activist

Women , Age , World , Religion

“Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world — and never will.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

"Consistency" (5 December 1887). This quote is engraved on Twain's bust in the National Hall of Fame

World , Soul , Loyalty

“I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; Garlands from window to window; Golden chains from star to star… And I dance.”

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Decadent and Symbolist poet

Source: Complete Works

Star , Dance

“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

Walter Benjamin book Theses on the Philosophy of History

Source: Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), IX

Angels , History , Past , Future

“Happy is the man who has broken the chains which hurt the mind, and has given up worrying once and for all.”

Ovid (-43–17 BC) Roman poet

Wise , Hurtful , Hurt , Happiness

“The proletarians have nothing to loose but their chains. They have a world to win.”

Karl Marx book The Communist Manifesto

Section 4, paragraph 11 (last paragraph)
Variant translation: Workers of the world, unite!
The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)
Variant: The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
Source: The Communist Manifesto
Context: The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

World

“Happy is the man who has broken the chains which hurt the mind, and has given up worrying once and for all.”
"Be patient and tough; one day this pain will be useful to you.”

Ovid Metamorphoses

Source: Metamorphoses

Pain , Hurt , Happiness

“He who has nothing—it has been said many times—has nothing to lose but his chains.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Time

“Freedom of mind is the real freedom. A person whose mind is not free though he may not be in chains, is a slave, not a free man. One whose mind is not free, though he may not be in prison, is a prisoner and not a free man. One whose mind is not free though alive, is no better than dead. Freedom of mind is the proof of one's existence.”

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…

Political Science for Civil Services Main Examination (2010)

Freedom , Personality , Dead

“(…) Work on, and the universe will work with you. After all the very idea of doing the right thing comes to you from the unknown. Leave it to the unknown as far as the results go, just go through the necessary movements. You are merely one of the links in the long chain of causation. Fundamentally, all happens in the mind only. When you work for something whole-heartedly and steadily, it happens, for it is the function of the mind to make things happen. (…).”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Work
Source: I am That, P.203.

Idea , Universe

“I have so often been asked the question: "But how did you come to think of The Scarlet Pimpernel?" And my answer has always been: "It was God's will that I should." And to you moderns, who perhaps do not believe as I do, I will say, "In the chain of my life, there were so many links, all of which tended towards bringing me to the fulfillment of my destiny."”

Emma Orczy (1865–1947) Hungarian-British author of "The Scarlet Pimpernel"

And nothing can be quite so wonderful as the workings of a man's or a woman's destiny.
Source: Links in the Chain of Life (1947), Ch. 8

Life , God , Question , Thinking

“Let a man find himself, in distinction from others, on top of two wheels with a chain — at least in a poor country like Russia — and his vanity begins to swell out like his tires. In America it takes an automobile to produce this effect.”

Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) Marxist revolutionary from Russia

The Russian Revolution (1930)

Country

“The strength of a chain is the strength of its weakest link.”

Josemaría Escrivá (1902–1975) Spanish theologian

#974
The Furrow (1986)

“I thought that my invincible power would hold the world captive, leaving me in a freedom undisturbed. Thus night and day I worked at the chain with huge fires and cruel hard strokes. When at last the work was done and the links were complete and unbreakable, I found that it held me in its grip.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

31
Gitanjali http://www.spiritualbee.com/gitanjali-poems-of-tagore/ (1912)

World , Freedom , Night

“You charming sex, you will be free; like men, you will enjoy all the delights that nature has made your obligations; you will not have to be constrained in any pleasure. Must the more divine section of humanity be clapped in irons by the less divine section? Ah, smash those chains—nature wants you to smash them! You should have no other limits than your leanings, no other laws than your cravings, no other morals than nature; stop languishing in those barbaric prejudices that caused your charms to fade and imprisoned the godly surges of your hearts.”

Marquis de Sade Philosophy in the Bedroom

Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans
Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795)

Men , Pleasure , Law , Sex

“There are one or two rules of thumb which are useful in distinguishing sadism from exciting adventure in the comics. Threat of torture is harmless, but when the torture it’s self is shown it becomes sadism. When a lovely heroine is show bound to the stake, comics followers are sure that the rescue will arrive just in the nick of time. The readers wish is to save the girl, not to see her suffer. A bound or chained person does not suffer even embarrassment in the comics, and the reader, therefore is not being taught to enjoy suffering.”

William Moulton Marston (1893–1947) American psychologist, lawyer, inventor and comic book writer

As quoted in Olive Richard Bryne's, "Don't laugh at the comics" Family Circle, Oct 25, 1940.

Love , Girl , Suffering , Time

“Direct interference in a person's life does not enter our scope of activity, nor, on the other, tralatitiously speaking, hand, is his destiny a chain of predeterminate links: some 'future' events may be linked to others, O. K., but all are chimeric, and every cause-and-effect sequence is always a hit-and-miss affair, even if the lunette has actually closed around your neck, and the cretinous crowd holds its breath.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Transparent Things

Transparent Things (1972), Ch. 24.

Life , Future , Personality

“Utopia is a spatial matter that might be thought to know potential change in fortunes in so spatialized a culture as the postmodern; but if this last is a dehistoricized and dehistorizing as I some times claim here, the synaptic chain that might lead the Utopian impulse to expression becomes harder to localize. Utopian representations knew an extraordinarily revival in the 1960's; if postmodernism is the substitute for the sixties and the compensation for their political failure, the question of Utopia would seem to be a crucial test of what is left of our capacity to imagine change at all.”

Fredric Jameson (1934) American academic

Introduction
Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)

Imagination , Failure , Question , Change

“The heavy hanging chains shall fall,
The walls shall crumble at the word,
And Freedom greet you with the light
And brothers give you back the sword.”

Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837) Russian poet

The Decembrists

Freedom , Light

“When asked what the difference between a karate punch and a kung-fu punch was during his first U. S. screen test in 1965, Bruce Lee replied, “Well, a karate punch is like being hit by an iron bar—whack! A kung-fu punch is like being hit by an iron ball swung on an iron chain with an iron ball attached to the end—it goes WHANG!—and it hurts inside.” Then he stood up and showed exactly what that might look like in a flurry of hands and feet moving so fast they blurred.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

Attributed

Hurt

“All ancient philosophers, poets, and moralists agree that love is a striving, an aspiration of the “lower” toward the “higher,” the “unformed” toward the “formed,” … “appearance” towards “essence,” “ignorance” towards “knowledge,” a “mean between fullness and privation,” as Plato says in the Symposium. … The universe is a great chain of dynamic spiritual entities, of forms of being ranging from the “prima materia” up to man—a chain in which the lower always strives for and is attracted by the higher, which never turns back but aspires upward in its turn. This process continues up to the deity, which itself does not love, but represents the eternally unmoving and unifying goal of all these aspirations of love. Too little attention has been given to the peculiar relation between this idea of love and the principle of the “agon,” the ambitious contest for the goal, which dominated Greek life in all its aspects—from the Gymnasium and the games to dialectics and the political life of the Greek city states. Even the objects try to surpass each other in a race for victory, in a cosmic “agon” for the deity. Here the prize that will crown the victor is extreme: it is a participation in the essence, knowledge, and abundance of “being.” Love is only the dynamic principle, immanent in the universe, which sets in motion this great “agon” of all things for the deity.
Let us compare this with the Christian conception. In that conception there takes place what might be called a reversal in the movement of love. The Christian view boldly denies the Greek axiom that love is an aspiration of the lower towards the higher. On the contrary, now the criterion of love is that the nobler stoops to the vulgar, the healthy to the sick, the rich to the poor, the handsome to the ugly, the good and saintly to the bad and common, the Messiah to the sinners and publicans. The Christian is not afraid, like the ancient, that he might lose something by doing so, that he might impair his own nobility. He acts in the peculiarly pious conviction that through this “condescension,” through this self-abasement and “self-renunciation” he gains the highest good and becomes equal to God. …
There is no longer any “highest good” independent of and beyond the act and movement of love! Love itself is the highest of all goods! The summum bonum is no longer the value of a thing, but of an act, the value of love itself as love—not for its results and achievements. …
Thus the picture has shifted immensely. This is no longer a band of men and things that surpass each other in striving up to the deity. It is a band in which every member looks back toward those who are further removed from God and comes to resemble the deity by helping and serving them.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1961), pp. 85-88

Love , Life , Men , God

“An aphorism is the last link in a long chain of thought.”

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830–1916) Austrian writer

Ein Aphorismus ist der letzte Ring einer langen Gedankenkette.
Source: Aphorisms (1880/1893), p. 19.

“I heard the Master preach.
“Don’t be chained to love and suffering. Instead, cut the ties of love and you will rejoice in your heart.” So he said in a loud voice.The Master is quite a fool.
He does not know: true it hurts to be tied with love, but it will hurt more to cut the ties of love, it will hurt more than even death.
In the tight binding of love’s bonds lies their unbinding.Thus great liberation is to be had in the bonds themselves.
My love, I was afraid the rope of your love might be weak so I doubled the strands of my love for you.”

Han Yong-un (1879–1944) Korean writer

"The Master’s Sermon", translated by Sammy Solberg

Love , Death , Fools , Suffering

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, that we've enjoyed some good times this evening, and enjoyed some laughter together, I feel it is my obligation to remind you of some of the negative, depressing, dangerous, life-threatening things that life is really all about; things you have not been thinking about tonight, but which will be waiting for you as soon as you leave the theater or as soon as you turn off your television sets. Anal rape, quicksand, body lice, evil spirits, gridlock, acid rain, continental drift, labor violence, flash floods, rabies, torture, bad luck, calcium deficiency, falling rocks, cattle stampedes, bank failure, evil neighbors, killer bees, organ rejection, lynching, toxic waste, unstable dynamite, religious fanatics, prickly heat, price fixing, moral decay, hotel fires, loss of face, stink bombs, bubonic plague, neo-Nazis, friction, cereal weevils, failure of will, chain reaction, soil erosion, mail fraud, dry rot, voodoo curse, broken glass, snake bite, parasites, white slavery, public ridicule, faithless friends, random violence, breach of contract, family scandals, charlatans, transverse myelitis, structural defects, race riots, sunspots, rogue elephants, wax buildup, killer frost, jealous coworkers, root canals, metal fatigue, corporal punishment, sneak attacks, peer pressure, vigilantes, birth defects, false advertising, ungrateful children, financial ruin, mildew, loss of privileges, bad drugs, ill-fitting shoes, widespread chaos, Lou Gehrig's disease, stray bullets, runaway trains, chemical spills, locusts, airline food, shipwrecks, prowlers, bathtub accidents, faulty merchandise, terrorism, discrimination, wrongful cremation, carbon deposits, beef tapeworm, taxation without representation, escaped maniacs, sunburn, abandonment, threatening letters, entropy, nine-mile fever, poor workmanship, absentee landlords, solitary confinement, depletion of the ozone layer, unworthiness, intestinal bleeding, defrocked priests, loss of equilibrium, disgruntled employees, global warming, card sharks, poisoned meat, nuclear accidents, broken promises, contamination of the water supply, obscene phone calls, nuclear winter, wayward girls, mutual assured destruction, rampaging moose, the greenhouse effect, cluster headaches, social isolation, Dutch elm disease, the contraction of the universe, paper cuts, eternal damnation, the wrath of God, and PARANOIAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Playing With Your Head (1986)

Life , God , Bad luck , Children

“Man is created free, and is free,
Though he be born in chains.”

Friedrich Schiller Die Worte des Glaubens

Die Worte des Glaubens (The Word of the Faithful), st. 2 (1797)

“I thought I should make something – I felt it would be so easy – it would take form under my hands like magic.
Then people would see!
A strong naked arm – a tanned powerful neck a young woman rests her head on the arching chest.
She closes her eyes and listens with open and quivering lips to the words he whispers into her long flowing hair.
I should paint that image just as I saw it – but in the blue haze.
Those two at that moment, no longer merely themselves, but simply a link in the chain binding generation to generation.
People should understand the significance, the power of it. They should remove their hats like they do in church.
There should be no more pictures of interiors, of people reading and women knitting.
There would be pictures of real people who breathed, suffered, felt, loved.
I felt impelled – it would be easy. The flesh would have volume – the colours would be alive.
There was an interval. The music stopped. I was a little sad. I remembered how many times I had had similar thoughts – and that once I had finished the painting – they had simply shaken their heads and smiled.
Once again I found myself out on the Boulevard des Italiens.”

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) Norwegian painter and printmaker

written in Saint Cloud, 1889
Quotes from his text: 'Saint Cloud Manifesto', Munch (1889): as quoted in Edvard Much – behind the scream, Sue Prideaux; Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, pp. 120 -121
1880 - 1895

Love , Women , People , Sadness

“[On why criminals rob nice-looking houses] You come up on a house where the grass is this tall, and there's a dog chained to the clothesline, and a motor swinging in the tree, buddy, that's a house where a gun lives! And you want to find out what kind it is, just crawl through the window after dark.”

Jeff Foxworthy (1958) American stand-up comedian

Totally Committed (1998)

Dogs , Tree , Grass , Housing

“Only indifference is free. What is distinctive is never free, it is stamped with its own seal, conditioned and chained.”

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate

As quoted in Sculpting in Time (1996), by Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 56

Indifference

“He is a clown in blackface sitting on the Supreme Court. He gets me that angry. He doesn't belong there. And for him to say, slaves have dignity. I mean, doesn't he know that slaves were in chains? That they were whipped on the back. If he saw the movie 12 Years as a Slave, you know, they were raped. And he says they had dignity as slaves or— My parents lost everything that they worked for, in the middle of their lives, in their thirties. His business, my father's business, our home, our freedom and we're supposed to call that dignified? Marched out of our homes at gun point. I mean, this man does not belong on the Supreme Court. He is an embarrassment.”

George Takei (1937) American actor and author

He is a disgrace to America.
Fox 10 News (Phoenix) interview https://www.facebook.com/FOX10Phoenix/videos/868880156493866/,
regarding Clarence Thomas writing "Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them." in his Obergefell v. Hodges dissent,

Home , Business , Parent , Freedom

“A servant, indeed, one will be able perhaps to bind down by fear; nay, not even for him, for he will soon leave you. But the partner of one's life, the mother of one's children, the foundation of one's every joy, one ought never to chain down by fear and threats, but with love and good temper. For what sort of union is that, where the wife trembles at her husband? And what sort of pleasure will the husband have if he dwells with his wife as with a slave? Yea, even though you suffer everything on her account, do not scold her; for neither did Christ do this to the Church.”

John Chrysostom (349–407) important Early Church Father

Homilies on Ephesians http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf113/Page_144.html, Homily XX

Love , Life , Children , Pleasure

“The whole world yearns after freedom, yet each creature is in love with his chains; this is the first paradox and inextricable knot of our nature.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Thoughts and Glimpses (1916-17)

Love , World , Nature , Freedom

“Moderation is the silken string running through the pearl chain of all virtues.”

Joseph Hall (1574–1656) British bishop

Christian Moderation, introduction.

“Hereafter we all have to be redeemed. The world is pulling with a thousand strings. We sin because of indifference and negligence and heap new guilt on the old original one. Our life is a chain of sin and expiation ruled by an incomprehensible providence.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Wir müssen alle einmal erlöst werden. Die Welt zieht uns mit tausend Banden. Wir fehlen aus Gleichgültigkeit und Nachsicht und häufen neue eigene Schuld auf alte ererbte. Unser Leben ist eine Kette aus Schuld und Sühne, darüber ein nach unerforschlichen Gesetzen wirkendes Schicksal waltet.
Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

Life , World , Indifference

“To free one's mind of chains is to free it of the care of what is acceptable or viewed so by society, this is when true freedom is discovered.”

John Dewey (1859–1952) American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer

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

Freedom

“Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage, or squirrels in a chain, ambitious men still climb and climb, with great labor, and incessant anxiety, but never reach the top.”

Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

Sometimes ascribed to Robert Browning, this is in fact a misquotation from Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621): "They [i.e. ambitious men] may not cease, but as a dog in a wheel, a bird in a cage, or a squirrel in a chain, so Budaeus compares them; they climb and climb still, with much labour, but never make an end, never at the top".
Misattributed

Men , Dogs , Bird

““In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free.” That’s what President Lincoln once wrote. “Honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.” Mr. Speaker, leaders and members of both parties, distinguished guests: We gather here to commemorate a century and a half of freedom -- not simply for former slaves, but for all of us. Today, the issue of chattel slavery seems so simple, so obvious -- it is wrong in every sense. Stealing men, women, and children from their homelands. Tearing husband from wife, parent from child; stripped and sold to the highest bidder; shackled in chains and bloodied with the whip. It’s antithetical not only to our conception of human rights and dignity, but to our conception of ourselves -- a people founded on the premise that all are created equal.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2015, Commemoration of the 150th Anniversary of the 13th Amendment (December 2015)

Women , Men , Children , People

“If first you rid yourself of hope and fear
You have dismayed the tyrant's wrath:
But whosoever quakes in fear or hope,
Drifting and losing his mastery,
Has cast away his shield, has left his place,
And binds the chain with which he will be bound.”
Nec speres aliquid nec extimescas, exarmaueris impotentis iram; at quisquis trepidus pauet uel optat, quod non sit stabilis suique iuris, abiecit clipeum locoque motus nectit qua ualeat trahi catenam.

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (480) philosopher of the early 6th century

Poem IV, lines 13-18
The Consolation of Philosophy · De Consolatione Philosophiae, Book I

Fear , Hope

“And every business can take action. All the business leaders who are here and our global economy companies have a responsibility to make sure that their supply chains, stretching into the far corners of the globe, are free of forced labor. […] Every faith community can take action as well, by educating their congregations, by joining in coalitions that are bound by a love of God and a concern for the oppressed. And like that Good Samaritan on the road to Jericho, we can’t just pass by, indifferent. We’ve got to be moved by compassion. We’ve got to bind up the wounds. Let’s come together around a simple truth -- that we are our brother’s keepers and we are our sister’s keepers. And finally, every citizen can take action: by learning more; by going to the website that we helped create -- SlaveryFootprint. org; by speaking up and insisting that the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the products we buy are made free of forced labor; by standing up against the degradation and abuse of women.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2012, Remarks at Clinton Global Initiative (September 2012)

Love , Women , God , Truth

“Either by God you mean something definite or you don't mean something definite. If by God you mean a personality who is concerned about human beings, who did all this out of love for human beings, who watches us and who intervenes, then I would have to say in the first place how do you know, what makes you think so? And in the second place, is that really an explanation? If that's true, what explains that? Why is there such a God? It isn't the end of the chain of whys, it just is another step, and you have to take the step beyond that.”

Steven Weinberg (1933) American theoretical physicist

Steven Weinberg, PBS interview, 1998 http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/transcript/wein-frame.html

Love , God , Thinking , Personality

“This conflict between the powers of love and chastity … it ended apparently in the triumph of chastity. Love was suppressed, held in darkness and chains, by fear, conventionality, aversion, or a tremulous yearning to be pure…. But this triumph of chastity was only an apparent, a pyrrhic victory. It would break through the ban of chastity, it would emerge — if in a form so altered as to be unrecognizable.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 4

Love , Fear , Victory

“Smashing up McDonald's or Starbuck's is pointless. Not that I give a damn about McDonald's or Starbuck's. I don't care whether anyone smashes them up or not. But that is not a revolutionary activity. Even if every fast-food chain in the world were wiped out the techno-industrial system would suffer only minimal harm as a result, since it could easily survive without fast-food chains. When you attack McDonald's or Starbuck's, you are not hitting where it hurts.”

Theodore Kaczynski (1942) American domestic terrorist, mathematician and anarchist

"Technology Is The Target", point 2
Hit Where It Hurts (2002)

World , Food , Suffering , Hurt

“Admittedly there is a risk in any course we follow other than this [surrender], but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face — that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight and surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand — the ultimatum. And what then? When Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we are retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary because by that time we will have weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he has heard voices pleading for "peace at any price" or "better Red than dead," or as one commentator put it, he would rather "live on his knees than die on his feet." And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don't speak for the rest of us. You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin — just in the face of this enemy?”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

1960s, A Time for Choosing (1964)

Life , War , People , Peace

“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.”

Voltaire (1694–1778) French writer, historian, and philosopher

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

Fools

“Gotta kill these pains
Or blow out my brains
To free me from these chains
I'm trapped in this physical hell
To walk again I just might sell my soul
And I'm only twenty somethin' years old”

Everlast (1969) American singer and songwriter

"Painkillers"
Whitey Ford Sings the Blues (1998)

Pain , Soul , Hell

“If e'er thy breast with freedom glow'd,
And spurn'd a tyrant's chain,
Let not thy strong oppressive force
A free-born mouse detain.”

Anna Laetitia Barbauld The Mouse's Petition

The Mouse's Petition (1773)

Freedom , Strong

“The public is a ferocious beast: one must chain it up or flee from it.”

Voltaire (1694–1778) French writer, historian, and philosopher

Le public est une bête féroce: il faut l’enchaîner ou la fuir.
Letter to Mademoiselle Quinault, quoted in Charles Sainte-Beuve, "Lettres inédites de Voltaire," Causeries de Lundi (20 October 1856) http://www.voltaire-integral.com/Grimm/Cayrol2.html; an English translation can be found on this page: http://www.humanistictexts.org/voltaire.htm
Citas

“The best critics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries demand perfect rhyming, and no aspirant for fame can afford to depart from a standard so universal. It is evidently the true goal of the English, as well as of the French bard; the goal from which we are but temporarily deflected during the preceding age.
But exceptions should and must be made in the case of a few who have somehow absorbed the atmosphere of other days, and who long in their hearts for the stately sound of the old classic cadences. Well may their predilection for imperfect rhyming be discouraged to a limited extent, but to chain them wholly to modern rules would be barbarous. Every limited mind demands a certain freedom of expression, and the man who cannot express himself satisfactorily without the stimulation derived from the spirited mode of two centuries ago should certainly be permitted to follow without undue restraint a practice so harmless, so free from essential error, and so sanctioned by precedent, as that of employing in his poetical compositions the smooth and inoffensive allowable rhyme.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

The Allowable Rhyme (1915)
Non-Fiction

Age , Error , Freedom , Universe

“Property, possessions and riches had also finally trapped him. They were no longer a game and a toy. They had become a chain and a burden.”

Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) German writer

H. Rosner, trans. (Bantam: 1971), pp. 76-79
Siddhartha (1922)
Context: The world had caught him; pleasure, covetousness, idleness, and finally also that vice he had always despised and scorned as the most foolish—acquisitiveness. Property, possessions and riches had also finally trapped him. They were no longer a game and a toy. They had become a chain and a burden.

Game

“Chorus: Let not thy love to man o'erleap the bounds
Of reason, nor neglect thy wretched state:
So my fond hope suggests thou shalt be free
From these base chains, nor less in power than Jove.
Prometheus: Not thus — it is not in the Fates that thus
These things should end; crush'd with a thousand wrongs,
A thousand woes, I shall escape these chains.
Necessity is stronger far than art.
Chorus: Who then is ruler of necessity?
Prometheus: The triple Fates and unforgetting Furies.
Chorus: Must Jove then yield to their superior power?
Prometheus: He no way shall escape his destined fate.
Chorus: What, but eternal empire, is his fate?
Prometheus: Thou mayst not know this now: forbear to inquire.
Chorus: Is it of moment what thou keep'st thus close?
Prometheus: No more of this discourse; it is not time
Now to disclose that which requires the seal
Of strictest secresy; by guarding which I shall escape the misery of these chains.”

Aeschylus Prometheus Bound

Source: Prometheus Bound, lines 510–524, as translated by R. Potter (1860)

Love , Fate , Hope , Art

“They're going to put y'all back in chains”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

Criticizing Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and the Republican speech, campaign speech http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/08/vp-biden-says-republicans-are-going-to-put-yall-back-in-chains/ in Danville, Virginia (August 14, 2012).
2010s
Context: We got a real clear picture of what they all value. Every Republican's voted for it. Look at what they value and look at their budget and what they're proposing. Romney wants to let the — he said in the first hundred days he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules, 'unchain Wall Street'. They're going to put y'all back in chains.

“But in actual fact the psychology of the working man in any of the Western democracies is totally unlike that which is assumed in the Communist Manifesto. He does not by any means feel that he has nothing to lose but his chains, nor indeed is this true. The chains which bind Asia and Africa in subjection to Europe are partly riveted by him. He is himself part of a great system of tyranny and exploitation.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1910s, Proposed Roads To Freedom (1918), Ch. VI: International Relations
Context: Those who have been inspired to action by the doctrine of the class war will have acquired the habit of hatred, and will instinctively seek new enemies when the old ones have been vanquished. But in actual fact the psychology of the working man in any of the Western democracies is totally unlike that which is assumed in the Communist Manifesto. He does not by any means feel that he has nothing to lose but his chains, nor indeed is this true. The chains which bind Asia and Africa in subjection to Europe are partly riveted by him. He is himself part of a great system of tyranny and exploitation. Universal freedom would remove, not only his own chains, which are comparatively light, but the far heavier chains which he has helped to fasten upon the subject races of the world.

Feeling , Democracy , Parting

“Against all the chains of facts I must have long arguments to bring; and the world's chaos requires an interpretation equally terrible.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XX The Cult
Context: My spirit is no longer what it was. Vaguely I seek, everywhere. I must see things with all their consequences, and right to their source. Against all the chains of facts I must have long arguments to bring; and the world's chaos requires an interpretation equally terrible.

World

“Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you have lost the genius of your own independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Speech at Edwardsville, Illinois (11 September 1858); quoted in Lincoln, Abraham; Mario Matthew Cuomo, Harold Holzer, G. S. Boritt, Lincoln on Democracy http://books.google.de/books?id=8bWmmyJEMZoC&pg=PA128 (Fordham University Press, September 1, 2004), 128. .
Variant of the above quote: What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling sea coasts, our army and our navy. These are not our reliance against tyranny All of those may be turned against us without making us weaker for the struggle. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in us. Our defense is in the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism at your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.
Fragment of Speech at Edwardsville, Ill., September 13, 1858; quoted in Lincoln, Abraham; The Writings of Abraham Lincoln V05 http://www.classic-literature.co.uk/american-authors/19th-century/abraham-lincoln/the-writings-of-abraham-lincoln-05/ebook-page-05.asp) p. 6-7
1850s
Context: What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling sea coasts, the guns of our war steamers, or the strength our gallant and disciplined army? These are not our reliance against a resumption of tyranny in our fair land. All of those may be turned against our liberties, without making us weaker or stronger for the struggle. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you have lost the genius of your own independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises.

Men

“A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains”

Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) Marxist revolutionary from Russia

Their Morals and Ours (1938)
Context: (On the American Civil War) "History has different yardsticks for the cruelty of the Northerners and the cruelty of the Southerners in the Civil War. A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!"

“It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning. … It is very hard to realise that this is all just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. It is even harder to realise that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”

Steven Weinberg (1933) American theoretical physicist

(1993), Epilogue, p. 154
The First Three Minutes (1977; second edition 1993)

Hostility , Future , Universe , Relation ships

“For nearly five hundred years, these rules and theories of an Arab Shaikh and the interpretations of generations of lazy and good-for-nothing priests have decided the civil and criminal law of Turkey. They have decided the form of the Constitution, the details of the lives of each Turk, his food, his hours of rising and sleeping the shape of his clothes, the routine of the midwife who produced his children, what he learned in his schools, his customs, his thoughts-even his most intimate habits. Islam – this theology of an immoral Arab – is a dead thing. Possibly it might have suited tribes in the desert. It is no good for modern, progressive state. God’s revelation! There is no God! These are only the chains by which the priests and bad rulers bound the people down. A ruler who needs religion is a weakling. No weaklings should rule.”

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) Turkish army officer, revolutionary, and the first President of Turkey

As quoted in Grey Wolf: Mustafa Kemal – An intimate study of a dictator (1932) by Harold Courtenay Armstrong, pp. 199-200
Disputed

School , Sleep , God , Clothes

“Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while. The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law. Systems which attempt to question it, deal in sounds instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light.”

Jeremy Bentham book An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation

Source: An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789; 1823), Ch. 1 : Of the Principle of Utility

Pain , Law , Question , Light

“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Source: Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843)

Soul , Religion , Time , Happiness

“The more you expect, the more you become a slave and chained down by your desires of wishing more for yourself.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“No amount of security is worth the suffering of a mediocre life chained to a routine that has killed your dreams.”

Stephie Pahlavi Zan

Dreams , Suffering , Life

“Each day has been chained to the previous one. But the weeks have wings. Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live my life.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Life

“After all, our lives are but a sequence of accidents - a clanking chain of chance events. A string of choices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity we call life.”

Rohinton Mistry A Fine Balance

Source: A Fine Balance

Life , Chance

“Last time you called me late at night you were naked and chained to your shower curtain rod. I hope this isn't going to be disappointing.”

Janet Evanovich High Five

Source: High Five

Hope , Disappointment , Time , Night

“That chain of relationships made me think of how connections are made--you read a book, you meet a person, you have a single experience, and your life is changed in some way. No act, therefore, however small, should be dismissed or ignored.”

Howard Zinn (1922–2010) author and historian

Source: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

Life , Books , Way , Thinking

“The shorter the chain between raw food and fork, the fresher it is and the more transparent the system is.”

Joel Salatin (1957) American environmentalist

Source: Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front

Food

“He puts the chain with the locket around my neck, then rests his hand over the spot where our baby would be. “You’re going to make a great mother, you know,” he says. He kisses me one last time and goes back to Finnick.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

Kiss , Time , Baby

“Ah, this is fine," he cried triumphantly, holding up a small medallion on a chain. He dusted it off, and engraved on one side were the words "WHY NOT?" "That's a good reason for almost anything - a bit used perhaps, but still quite serviceable.”

Norton Juster book The Phantom Tollbooth

Source: The Phantom Tollbooth

“In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion

Food , Dead

“It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

Source: The God of Small Things

Dreams , Travel

“Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.”

Theodore Dreiser book Sister Carrie

Variant: How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.
Source: Sister Carrie

Feeling