Quotes about chain (717 quotes, page 2)

“It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Source: Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80's

Law , Food , Sea

“Your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip," Jonathan would say, other times, "is nothing more than your thought itself, in a form you can see. Break the chains of your thought, and you break the chains of your body, too.”

Richard Bach book Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Source: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Time

“Here she comes, running, out of prison and off the pedestal: chains off, crown off, halo off, just a live woman.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) American feminist, writer, commercial artist, lecturer and social reformer

“We are captives, even if our wheat grows over the fences/ and swallows rise from our broken chains./ We are captives of what we love, what we desire, and what we are.”

Mahmoud Darwich (1941–2008) Palestinian writer

Source: Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

Love

“So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a link of it.”

Arthur Conan Doyle book A Study in Scarlet

Source: A Study in Scarlet

Life , Nature

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

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Strong

“I dropped all the guards. All the leashes, all the chains, everything that ever restrained me through the discipline and fear of discovery, I let it all go. No need to hide.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Burns

Fear

“If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Source: Anna Karenina

“She cannot chain my soul. Yes, she could hurt me. She'd already done so… I would bleed, or not. Scar, or not. Live, or not. But she could not hurt my soul, not unless I gave it to her.”

Laurie Halse Anderson book Chains

Source: Chains

Soul , Hurt

“To be obsessed by the idea of freedom, for instance, is itself a form of slavery. Such people are in the chains of the hope of freedom, and are therefore able to do little else than struggle with them.”

Idries Shah book Reflections

Source: Reflections

People , Hope , Idea , Freedom

“No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

Speech at Civil Rights Mass Meeting, Washington, D.C. (22 October 1883).
1880s, Speech at the Civil Rights Mass Meeting (1883)
Variant: No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.

“i remembered the myth about Andromeda and how she had been chained to a rock by her own parents as a sacrifice to a sea monster. Maybe she'd gotten too many F's on her report card or something.”

Rick Riordan book The Sea of Monsters

Source: The Sea of Monsters

Parent , Sea

“Memories are links in a golden chain that bind us until we meet again.”

Jacqueline Winspear Maisie Dobbs

Source: Maisie Dobbs

Memory

“Man, it was a good thing vampires didn't get cancer. Lately he'd been chain-smoking like a felon.”

Jessica Bird book Lover Unbound

Source: Lover Unbound

“How closely women clutch the very chains that bind them!”

Margaret Mitchell book Vom Winde verweht (1937 German edition)

Source: Gone with the Wind

Women

“I have survived. I am here. Confused, screwed up, but here. So, how can I find my way? Is there a chain saw of the soul, an ax I can take to my memories or fears?”

Laurie Halse Anderson Speak

Source: Speak

Fear , Way , Soul , Memory

“I don't know why it's called "getting lost." Even when you turn down the wrong street, when you find yourself at the dead end of a chain-link fence or a road that turnd to sand, you are somewhere. It just isn't where you expected to be.”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

Source: Vanishing Acts

Dead

“I grew up in a household where we didn't really talk about our feelings, and where the only reason you went to a doctor was because you'd accidentally cut off a limb with a chain saw.”

Jodi Picoult book Sing You Home

Source: Sing You Home

Feeling

“I'm the top of the food chain and well… you're the food.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon book Dance with the Devil

Source: Dance with the Devil

Food

“Freedom is the dream you dream
While putting thought in chains again”

Giacomo Leopardi Canti

Source: Canti

Dreams , Freedom

“We are chained to that which we do not forgive”

Richard Paul Evans (1962) American writer

Source: The Locket

Forgiveness

“If men should read these words, let them know that power is a heavy burden. Seek not to be bound by its chains.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Final Empire

Men , Reading

“I understood that centuries of chains and lashes will not kill the spirit of man nor the sense of truth within him.”

Ayn Rand book Anthem

Source: Anthem

Truth , Sense

“There are times in this life when a person must do or say things he doesn't want to. Human beings and chains, it is the oldest acquaintanceship in the world.”

Nadeem Aslam book Maps for Lost Lovers

Source: Maps for Lost Lovers

Life , World , Time , Personality

“It's okay," my husband said, shuffling toward his study. "I bought an electric-powered chain saw with a plug-in cord so if I run away fast enough, you can only chase me so far.”

Laurie Notaro American writer

Source: I Love Everybody

Study

“If a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, then a family is more like a rope. We're lots of fragile little strands, and we survive by becoming hopelessly intertwined with each other.”

Brian K. Vaughan (1976) American screenwriter, comic book creator

Source: Saga, Vol. 7

Family , Strong

“I wished that the chains would break and the wind would sweep me up, up, up into the sky, beyond the clouds, beyond the sun and the moon, to some marvelous kingdom where no one ever changed and friends were friends for life.”

Mary Downing Hahn (1937) American children's writer

Source: Daphne's Book

Life , Change , Sun

“The individual does actually carry on a double existence: one designed to serve his own purposes and another as a link in a chain, in which he serves against, or at any rate without, any volition of his own.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

“What do you want, Acheron? (Artemis)
You know what I want. After all I’m the top of the Food Chain and you…you’re the Food. (Acheron)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon book Dance with the Devil

Source: Dance with the Devil

Food

“Mercy is the golden chain by which society is bound together.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

“Ranger appeared in the bathroom doorway and I was too relieved to be embarrassed. "I appreciate you coming out in the middle of the night," I said.

Ranger smiled. "I didn't want to miss seeing you chained up naked.”

Janet Evanovich book One for the Money

Source: One for the Money

Smile , Appearance , Night

“It isn’t only art that is incompatible with happiness, it’s also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World

Source: Brave New World

Art , Science , Happiness

“It is far better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

Freedom

“Someone had to do something sometime. Every victim was a culprit, every culprit a victim, and somebody had to stand up sometime to try to break the lousy chain of inherited habit that was imperiling them all.”

Joseph Heller book Catch-22

Source: Catch-22

“There was beauty in the idea of freedom, but it was an illusion. Every human heart was chained by love.”

Cassandra Clare book Lady Midnight

Source: Lady Midnight

Love , Beauty , Idea , Freedom

“Death, only death, can break the lasting chain;
And here, ev'n then, shall my cold dust remain”

Alexander Pope Eloisa to Abelard

Source: Eloisa to Abelard

Death

“Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
’T is the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur,—you ’re straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.”

Emily Dickinson book The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Life, p. 9
Collected Poems (1993)
Source: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Sense , Madness

“The past can be a terrible weight bound to you by an unbreakable chain. You can drag it with you, forever looking over your shoulder at what holds you back. Or you can let it go and move forward. It’s your choice.”

Raymond E. Feist book Shards of a Broken Crown

Source: Shards of a Broken Crown

Past

“I will draw you back to me. You shall see. By a chain of stars.”

Tanith Lee Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer

Source: Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer

Star , Drawing

“Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Source: To Kill a Mockingbird

“Are you the welcoming committee? Or has Jeremy finally chained you up to the front gate where you belong?"
"I missed you too.”

Kelley Armstrong book Bitten

Source: Bitten

“In chains and darkness, wherefore should I stay, And mourn in prison, while I keep the key.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book The Harlequin

Source: The Harlequin

“Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”

Dylan Thomas Fern Hill

St. 6
Variant: I sang in my chains like the sea
Source: Fern Hill (1946)

Time , Sea

“Not everyone is willing to embrace liberty; liberty requires not just effort, but risk. Some people choose to delude themselves and see their chains as protective armor.”

Terry Goodkind Chainfire

Source: Chainfire

People , Effort

“Time was something that moved in fits and starts for Magnus, dissipating like mist or dragging like chains, but when Alec was here, Magnus’s time seemed to fall into an easy rhythm with Alec’s, like two heartbeats falling into sync.”

Cassandra Clare The Bane Chronicles

Source: The Bane Chronicles

Time

“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number —
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you —
Ye are many — they are few.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

St. 91
(1819)
Source: The Masque of Anarchy: Written on Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester

Sleep

“A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: The Art of Travel

Travel , Chance , Time

“My mom had a soft heart after all! Instead of being chained by both wrists, we were only chained by one ankle!
I mean, if I’d been looking for proof that she really did love me, this was it, right?”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Love , Moms , Heart

“Cursed?" I offered, my voice croaky because of my unshed tears.
"It isn't cursed." John said deliberately, rearranging the chain around my neck, "if you're wearing it. It's blessed.”

Meg Cabot (1967) Novelist

Source: Underworld

Tear

“He was dressed just like on TV, with lots of silver chains and bracelets, ripped jeans, and a black muscle shirt (Which was kind of stupid, since he didn't have any muscles).”

Rick Riordan The Maze of Bones

Source: The Maze of Bones

Stupidity

“Froi saw the foolishness of dreamers, and he decided he'd like to die so foolish. With a dream in his heart about the possibilities, rather than a chain of hopelessness.”

Melina Marchetta (1965) Australian teen writer

Source: Quintana of Charyn

Dreams , Heart

“If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.”

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer

“I've always felt that the best whips and chains are in the mind. With a little creativity, the physical ones are hardly necessary.”

Jim Butcher book Blood Rites

Source: Blood Rites

“After departure, only invisible things are left, perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory and loss and love. So many things, so many people, depart! And we can only repossess them in our minds.”

James Baldwin book Going to Meet the Man

Source: Going to Meet the Man

Love , Life , People , World

“But after a moment a sense of waste and ruin overcame him. There they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well been half the world apart.”

Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence

Source: The Age of Innocence

World , Sense

“The simpler, the better. Complications lead to multiplicative chains of unanticipated effects.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“What kind of knife is this?” Locke held a rounded buttering utensil up for Chains’ inspection. “It’s all wrong. You couldn’t kill anyone with this.”

Scott Lynch The Lies of Locke Lamora

Source: The Lies of Locke Lamora

“Every word I say has chains round its ankles; every thought I think is weighted with heavy weights.”

Jean Rhys book Good Morning, Midnight

Source: Good Morning, Midnight

Thinking

“I don’t like this, Artemis. I’m not a dog to be chained outside your house because you’re afraid I’ll piss on your rug. (Acheron)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Acheron

Dogs , Housing

“Magnus had been alive hundreds of years himself, and yet the simplest things could turn a day into a jewel, and a succession of days into a glittering chain that went on and on. Here was the simplest thing: a pretty girl liked him, and the day shone.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: Vampires, Scones, and Edmund Herondale

Girl , Success

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

Assata Shakur (1947) American activist who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army

To My People (July 4, 1973)
Source: Assata: An Autobiography

Love , Support , Freedom , Fight

“She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.”

Edith Wharton book The House of Mirth

Source: The House of Mirth

Fate

“I’d planned to kill them, too.” When Néomi glared up at him, he raised his chained hands.
“Past tense. See? Already I’m improving.”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: Dark Needs at Night's Edge

Past

“All of the real heroes are not storybook combat fighters, either. Every single man in this Army plays a vital role. Don't ever let up. Don't ever think that your job is unimportant. Every man has a job to do and he must do it. Every man is a vital link in the great chain.”

George S. Patton (1885–1945) United States Army general

Speech to the Third Army (1944)

Thinking

“ There is […] no necessary connection between the symbol and that which is symbolized. Just as men can wear yachting costumes without ever having been near a yacht, so they can make the noise "I'm hungry" without being hungry. Furthermore, just as social rank can be symbolized by feathers in the hair, by tattooing on the breast, by gold ornaments on the watch chain, or by a thousand different devices according to the culture we live in, so the fact of being hungry can be symbolized by a thousand different noises according to the culture we live in: "J'ai faim," or "Es hungert mich," or "Ho appetito," or "Hara ga hetta," and so on.”

S. I. Hayakawa book Language in Thought and Action

Source: Language in Thought and Action (1949), Language as Symbolism, p. 27

Men , Tattoo

“Where, oh, where's the chain to fling,
One that will chain Cupid's wing—
One that will have longer power
Than the April sun or shower?”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(14th January 1826) Lezione per l’Amore
The London Literary Gazette, 1826

Sun

“Thou, Poetry, in absence wert a chain,
Binding our hearts together: where so well
As in thy numbers, could I pour my soul,
In soothing tenderness? 'twas bliss, to make
Thought visible to those of whom I thought.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Farewell
The Fate of Adelaide (1821)

Soul , Heart

“In the history of madness, two events signal this change with singular clarity: in 1657, the founding of the Hôpital Général, and the Great Confinement of the poor; and in 1794, the liberation of the mad in chains at Bicêtre. Between these two singular and symmetrical events, something happened, whose ambiguity has perplexed historians of medicine: blind repression in an absolutist regime, according to some, and, according to others, the progressive discovery, by science and philanthropy, of madness in its positive truth. In fact, beneath these reversible meanings, a structure was taking shape, which did not undo that ambiguity but was decisive for it. This structure explains the passage from the medieval and humanist experience of madness to the experience that is our own, which confines madness in mental illness.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Preface to 1961 edition
History of Madness (1961)

Truth , History , Decision , Science

“Mr. Libby's story that he was at the tail end of a chain of phone calls, passing on from one reporter what he heard from another, was not true. It was false. He was at the beginning of the chain of the phone calls, the first official to disclose this information outside the government to a reporter. And he lied about it afterward, under oath and repeatedly.”

Patrick Fitzgerald (1960) American lawyer

Cheney Adviser Resigns After Indictment on ABCnews.com (October 28, 2005) http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=1260229

Falseness

“There is not any present moment that is unconnected with some future one. The life of every man is a continued chain of incidents, each link of which hangs upon the former. The transition from cause to effect, from event to event, is often carried on by secret steps, which our foresight cannot divine, and our sagacity is unable to trace. Evil may at some future period bring forth good; and good may bring forth evil, both equally unexpected.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

Very often attributed to Addison, this is in fact by Hugh Blair, published in Blair's Sermons (1815), Vol. 1, pp. 196-197.
Misattributed

Life , Secret , Evil , Future

“Tarzan of the Apes had decided to mark his evolution from the lower orders in every possible manner, and nothing seemed to him a more distinguishing badge of manhood than ornaments and clothing.
To this end, therefore, he collected the various arm and leg ornaments he had taken from the black warriors who had succumbed to his swift and silent noose, and donned them all after the way he had seen them worn.
About his neck hung the golden chain from which depended the diamond encrusted locket of his mother, the Lady Alice. At his back was a quiver of arrows slung from a leathern shoulder belt, another piece of loot from some vanquished black.
About his waist was a belt of tiny strips of rawhide fashioned by himself as a support for the home-made scabbard in which hung his father's hunting knife. The long bow which had been Kulonga's hung over his left shoulder.
The young Lord Greystoke was indeed a strange and war-like figure, his mass of black hair falling to his shoulders behind and cut with his hunting knife to a rude bang upon his forehead, that it might not fall before his eyes.
His straight and perfect figure, muscled as the best of the ancient Roman gladiators must have been muscled, and yet with the soft and sinuous curves of a Greek god, told at a glance the wondrous combination of enormous strength with suppleness and speed.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 13 : His Own Kind

God , War , Way , Home

“If someone were to discover, for instance, that under hitherto unobserved circumstances stones were able to speak, it would take only a few pages to describe and explain so earth-shattering a phenomenon. On the other hand, one can always write yet another book about positive thinking, and this is far from being of only academic interest, since it involves a method that makes it impossible ever to arrive at a clear resolution of life's most important questions. Human activities might be graded by the quantity of words required: the more words, the worse their character. All the knowledge that has led our species from wearing animal skins to people flying, complete with proofs, would fill a handful of reference books, but a bookcase the size of the earth would not suffice to hold all the rest, quite apart from the vast discussions that are conducted not with the pen but with the sword and chains. The thought suggests itself that we carry on our human business in a most irrational manner when we do not use those methods by which the exact sciences have forged ahead in such exemplary fashion.”

Robert Musil book The Man Without Qualities

The Man Without Qualities (1930–1942)

Life , People , Books , Fashion

“[Describing her visit to a slaughter facility in Pennsylvania] The floor was very slippery and the walls and everything else were covered with blood. Dried blood had formed a crust on the chains. I surely didn't want to fall down in all that blood and guts. The workers wore non-slip boots, yellow aprons, and helmets. It was a scene of controlled, mechanized chaos.”

Sue Coe (1951) British artist

Dead Meat, as quoted in A Plea for the Animals by Matthieu Ricard (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2016), p. 78 https://books.google.it/books?id=bTLuDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA78.

“Knowledge isn’t restrained by the limits of Malthus. Information doesn’t need topsoil to grow in, only freedom. Given eager minds and experimentation, it feeds itself like a chain reaction.”

David Brin book Earth

Part IX (p. 531)
Earth (1990)

Knowledge , Freedom

“.. upon the frightening gray sky one can see a black mountain, completely black even with black houses, and all of a sudden a fire-red house appears, a violet path with snowflakes and on the path a black chain of people like crows.”

Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938) expressionist painter

Quote from Werefkin's letter to Alexej von Jawlensky, 1910 Lithuanian Martynas-Mazvydas-National Library, Vilnius, RS (F19-1458,1.31) as reprinted in Weidle, Marianne Werefkin, Die Farbe beisst mich ans Herz, 108; as quoted in 'Identity and Reminiscence in Marianne Werefkin's Return Home', c. 1909; Adrienne Kochman http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring06/52-spring06/spring06article/171-ambiguity-of-home-identity-and-reminiscence-in-marianne-werefkins-return-home-c-1909
1906 - 1911

People , Mountain , Appearance , Housing

“There was a little white statue there. Now I'm not artistic. I saw it was of a fellow with no clothes on - I always wonder why it's Art to take your clothes off: they never put in the goose pimples - and this fellow was wrapped in chains. He didn't look as if he was enjoying himself, and small wonder.”

Diana Wynne Jones book The Homeward Bounders

Source: The Homeward Bounders (1981), p. 13.

Art , Clothes

“It is also the becoming-space of the spoken chain - which has been called temporal or linear; a becoming-space which makes possible both writing and every correspondence between speech and writing, every passage from one to the other.
The activity or productivity connoted by the a of différance refers to the generative movement in the play of differences. The latter are neither fallen from the sky nor inscribed once and for all in a closed system, a static structure that a synchronic and taxonomic operation could exhaust. Differences are the effects of transformations, and from this vantage the theme of différance is incompatible with the static, synchronic, taxonomic, ahistoric motifs in the concept of structure.”

Jacques Derrida book Positions

Source: Positions (1982), p. 28

“The tendency was to sell families as units, if for no other reason [than] to keep the slaves contented. The gangs in transit were usually a cheerful lot, though the presence of a number of the more vicious type sometimes made it necessary for them all to go in chains. At the other extreme, when the Central of Georgia railroad company in 1858 equipped a Negro sleeping car to assist in the slave trade it set a standard not always maintained in a later generation. When on the block, the slave was as likely to hinder as to help in his sale. Some, out of a vain conceit in bringing a high price, would boast of their physical prowess, in which case an unwary purchaser would likely be cheated. Others would malinger, because of a grudge against owners or traders or in order to bring a low price and be put at less tiring labor. Dealers, also, adopted the tricks of horse traders to make their merchants more attractive -- the greasiest Negro was generally considered the healthiest.”

W. Cleon Skousen (1913–2006) ex FBI agent, conservative United States author and faith-based political theorist

The Making of America (1986)

Family , Cars , Sleep , Help

“I don’t need to praise anything so justly famous as Frost’s observation of and empathy with everything in Nature from a hornet to a hillside; and he has observed his own nature, one person’s random or consequential chains of thoughts and feelings and perceptions, quite as well. (And this person, in the poems, is not the “alienated artist” cut off from everybody who isn’t, yum-yum, another alienated artist; he is someone like normal people only more so — a normal person in the less common and more important sense of normal.)”

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

“The Other Frost”, p. 29
Poetry and the Age (1953)

People , Feeling , Nature , Sense

“On a bough,
The only one chained by the honeysuckle,
Sat two white Doves, upon each neck a tint
Like the rose-stain within the delicate shell
Of the sea-pearl, as Love breathed on their plumes.
And each was mirror'd in the other's eyes,
Floating and dark, a paradise of passion.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(10th May 1823) Poetical Catalogue of Paintings - Two Doves in a Grove. Mr. Glover's Exhibition.
24th May 1823) Inez see The Improvisatrice (1824
The London Literary Gazette, 1823

Love , Passion , Sea

“I’ve lost a lot of young, brilliant friends. Andy Wood and Layne [Staley] and Jeff Buckley, who was a good friend, and Kurt [Cobain], and Shannon Hoon [of Blind Melon] was a friend, and Mike Starr [Alice In Chains] was a friend, the list can kind of go on if I sit here and try and remember. And they’re all young and these guys all had limitless potential in their lives in front of them. And I think there’s something so inspiring about that – that is like the miracle of youth. And to see that be the final chapter so young is a really hard thing to swallow every time.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

The Life & Times of Chris Cornell, Rolling Stone Australia, 17 September 2015 https://rollingstoneaus.com/music/post/the-life-and-times-of-chris-cornell/2273,
Solo career Era

Youth , Guy , Thinking , Time

“Fellow citizens, we may now say that the past, with all its wealth of glorious associations, is secure. The air is filled with brightness; the horizon is aglow with hope. The future is full of magnificent possibilities. But God has committed to us a trust which we must not, we dare not overlook. By the dispensation of his Providence, the chains have been stricken from four millions of the inhabitants of this Republic, and he has shown us the truth of that early utterance of Abraham Lincoln's, 'This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave must have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and under a just God cannot long retain it.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1860s, Oration at Ravenna, Ohio (1865)

God , Truth , World , Hope

Chittaranjan Das (1870–1925) Indian politician and leader of the Swaraj Party

Speech in defence of Aurobindo Ghosh in the Maincktala Bomb Case. The judgement was issued in 1909. Source: Collected Works of Deshbandhu.
Legal

Life , Law , Dreams , Idea

“Jerry Cantrell speaking with the crowd during Alice in Chains' concert at the InMusic Festival in Zagreb, Croatia on June 27, 2018, quoted in”

Jerry Cantrell (1966) American musician and songwriter

https://www.nme.com/news/interpol-offered-a-classy-conclusion-to-a-sensational-inmusic-festival-in-zagreb-2346552, Interpol offered a classy conclusion to a sensational INmusic Festival in Zagreb, NME, June 28, 2018
On Alice in Chains

Quotes

“The question rises whether in the middle of all these manifold, exciting labors and Party-assignments I could still find rime for intimate experiences, for the pangs and joys of love. Unfortunately, yes! I say unfortunately because ordinarily these experiences entailed all too many cares, disappointments, and pain, and because all too many energies were pointlessly consumed through them. Yet the longing to be understood by a man down to the deepest, most secret recesses of one's soul, to be recognized by him as a striving human being, repeatedly decided matters. And repeatedly disappointment ensued all too swiftly, since the friend saw in me only the feminine element which he tried to mold into a willing sounding board to his own ego. So repeatedly the moment inevitably arrived in which I had to shake off the chains of community with an aching heart but with a sovereign, uninfluenced will. Then I was again alone. But the greater the demands life made upon me, the more the responsible work waiting to be tackled, the greater grew the longing to be enveloped by love, warmth, understanding. All the easier, consequently, began the old story of disappointment in love, the old story of Titania in "A Midsummer Night's Dream."”

Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) Soviet diplomat

The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926)

Love , Life , Pain , Secret

“I know a lovely little flower, a flower for which I pine —
I would go gather it, but bars my heavy hours confine;
Oh, grief, when free, how easily that little flower was mine!
...
Oh, were I sinking to the grave I often ask in vain,
And welcome Death stood by to loose the wasted captive's chain —
Ah, name me the Forget-me-not, I'd wake to life again!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The London Literary Gazette (3rd January 1835) Versions from the German (First Series.) - 'The Lovely Little Flower' — Goethe.
Translations, From the German

Love , Life , Death , Flowers

“All songwriters are links in a chain.”

Pete Seeger (1919–2014) American folk singer

Interview with Paul Zollo in 1988 https://americansongwriter.com/2014/01/american-icons-pete-seeger/

“I had scarcely entered the room when I saw on my table an open book I had not put there. It was the works of Cardano. I did not intend to read it, but my gaze fell as though compelled on a story told by that philosopher. He writes that he was studying one night by candlelight when he saw two tall old men come in through the closed doors of his room. He asked them many questions, and they finally told him they were from the Moon; whereupon they disappeared.
I was so surprised, both by the book that had put itself on my table and by the page it was open to, that I took this chain of events for an inspiration from God, who was urging me to tell people that the Moon is a world.”

Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) French novelist, dramatist, scientist and duelist

The Other World (1657)

Men , God , People , Books

“…I do not say any form which you construct this way is a good form, or must lead to a good solution; but there are forms which can lead to good solutions, and of course that is only the first link in a whole chain of investigations, and the other links in the investigation, model tests, measuring of the first structure, or a model test in scale 1:1 as we have it out here, these are of primary importance. So the engineer[‘s] problem is remaining all the same, but it is the first link, here, the shaping which has been lacking up to now, and this method can lead to a very nice solution.”

Heinz Isler (1926–2009) engineer

First Congress of the International Association of Shell Structures (now IASS), Madrid (1959) discussion following presentation of his paper paper ‘New Shapes for Shells’, as quoted by John Chilton, "39 etc… : Heinz Isler’s infinite spectrum of new shapes for shells" (2009) Proceedings of the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS) Symposium 2009, Valencia, Evolution and Trends in Design, Analysis and Construction of Shell and Spatial Structures, 28 September – 2 October 2009, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain, eds. Alberto Domingo, Carlos Lazaro.

Way , Problem

“You sittin' here chained to your rockin' chair.”

Hoagy Carmichael (1899–1981) American composer, pianist, singer, actor and bandleader

Song: Rockin’ Chair http://www.mtv.com/music/artist/carmichael_hoagy/1466609/lyrics.jhtml (1930).

“When someone is made the head of an office in the Ogilvy & Mather chain, I send him a Matrioshka doll from Gorky. If he has the curiosity to open it, and keep opening it until he comes to the inside of the smallest doll, he finds this message: If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.”

David Ogilvy (1911–1999) Advertising executive

Ogilvy on Advertising, p. 47

People

“No jailer can compel any prisoner to speak or act against that prisoner's will, but chains can prevent his acting, and a gag can prevent his speaking.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Give Me Liberty (1936)

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

Aurobindo, from a letter of Sri Aurobindo that C.R. Das was reading out while defending him in the Alipore Bomb Trial. C.R. Das Speech in defence of Aurobindo Ghosh in the Maincktala Bomb Case. The judgement was issued in 1909. Source: Collected Works of Deshbandhu.

Life , Law , Dreams , Idea

“Whereas Marx’s vision of homo faber becomes inoperative within social chains, Stirner’s man makes his own freedom.”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 79

Freedom