Quotes about chain (717 quotes, page 5)

“It is the small flock of God. "Whoever receives in my name one of those little" said Jesus, "It is myself who receives." What thinks the one that sticks, that maims, or inflicts to their pure souls more black sorrow than death? (…) The curse of a crowd of children, is a cataclysm, a horror prodigy, a chain of dark mountains in the sky, with a cavalcade of thunder and lightning in their tops. It is the infinite of the cries of all deep, is a not know what highly powerful unforgiving and extinguishing any hope of forgiveness.”

Léon Bloy (1846–1917) French writer, poet and essayist

Léon Bloy, Octavio de Faria, portuguese edition, page 101. Léon Bloy, Octavio de Faria, portuguese edition, page 101. https://books.google.com.br/books?id=wI4SAAAAYAAJ&q=%C3%89+o+rebanho+dos+pequenos+de+Deus.+%22Quem+quer+que+receba+em+meu+nome+um+desses+pequenos%22+disse+Jesus&dq=%C3%89+o+rebanho+dos+pequenos+de+Deus.+%22Quem+quer+que+receba+em+meu+nome+um+desses+pequenos%22+disse+Jesus&hl=pt-BR&sa=X&ved=0CBsQ6AEwAGoVChMI0Ovrgrn5yAIVQpGQCh3fFwGB

Death , God , Children , Hope

“By August, 1913, all links in the chain of moving assembly lines were complete except the last and most spectacular one - the one we had first experimented with one Sunday morning just five years before. Again a towrope was hitched to a chassis, this time pulled by a capstan. Each part was attached to the moving chassis in order, from axles at the beginning to bodies at the end of the line. Some parts took longer to attach than others; so, to keep an even pull on the towrope, there must be differently spaced intervals between delivery of the parts along the line. This called for patient timing and rearrangement until the flow of parts and the speed and intervals along the assembly line meshed into a perfectly synchronized operation throughout all stages of production. Before the end of the year a power-driven assembly line was in operation, and New Year's saw three more installed. Ford mass production and a new era in industrial history had begun.”

Charles E. Sorensen (1881–1968) American businessman

Source: My Forty Years with Ford, 1956, p. 130-131 ; As cited in: EyeWitness to History (2005)

History , Time , Parting , Speed

“In the Middle Ages, people were born and baptized into the Church. But the Church was the corpus mysticum and it depended upon one's own free will whether one wanted to be a living or a dead member of the Mystical Body of Christ. The cry "traitor" was only raised against those who broke the solemn oath of allegiance, not those who chose to go ways different from their status of birth. The Connêtable Charles de Bourbon who served with Charles V, or Marshal Moritz of Saxony, the great general under Louis XV were hardly considered to be traitors. Soldiers picked out the countries they wanted to serve. Prospective monks chose their orders. There were no "traitors to the proletariat" or "traitors to democracy." Today we live in an age of increased predestination and decreased free will, where Calvin, Freud, Marx, Luther, Darwin, Dewey, and the host of racial biologists have laid down the inexorable laws of anthropological, religious, psychological, environmental, and sociological determinism with no hope for escape. We are merely exhorted to make a virtue out of necessity and to be loyal to our prison and prisoners. Every attempt from our side to escape the artificial shell or to use our dormant remainders of free will to destroy the chains is branded as treason and punished accordingly by State or Society or even by both.”

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909–1999) Austrian noble and political theorist

Pg 133, emphasis in the original
The Menace of the Herd (1943)

People , Age , Law , Hope

“The deliberate, solemn conviction of good men through the world, that slavery is a grievous wrong to human nature, will make itself felt. To increase this moral power is every man's duty. To embody and express this great truth is in every man's power; and thus every man can do something to break the chain of the slave.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Slavery (1835)

Men , Truth , World , Nature

“So I sold the town away, I couldn’t wait to forget you, I was killed in half a day, I hadn’t time to regret you, ~ "Life On A Chain"”

Pete Yorn (1974) American musician

Song lyrics

Life , Time , Waiting , Forgetting

“The poor themselves can create a poverty-free world — all we have to do is to free them from the chains that we have put around them.”

Muhammad Yunus (1940) Bangladeshi banker, economist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

"Eliminating Poverty Through Market-Based Social Entrepreneurship" in Global Urban Development Magazine (May 2005) http://www.globalurban.org/Issue1PIMag05/Yunus%20article.htm

World

“Trust is a chain that gets longer the less you pull on it.”

Neil Strauss book The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships

The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships (2015)

“Oft, in the stilly night,
Ere Slumber's chain has bound me,
Fond Memory brings the light
Of other days around me;
The smiles, the tears,
Of boyhood's years,
The words of love then spoken;
The eyes that shone,
Now dimm'd and gone,
The cheerful hearts now broken!”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

National Airs, Oft in the Stilly Night http://www.james-joyce-music.com/song04_lyrics.html, st. 1 (1815).

Love , Smile , Tear , Light

“Thirty-two years ago, I became a vegetarian. I always thought it was a bit weird eating dead bodies even though my parents said it was all right. But I saw "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," and that did it. In the movie, they're doing the same thing to people that they do to animals, and so I gradually got off eating meat…. The health thing came way later. Veganism came four years ago, and it was more of a health decision.”

Phil Collen (1957) British musician

"How Def Leppard's Phil Collen traded the booze for a better body," interview with the Los Angeles Times (27 June 2015) http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-phil-collen-def-leppard-interview-20150627-story.html.

People , Health , Way , Parent

“But has man's political skill marched hand-in-hand with his technical and scientific skill? Man can chain lightning to his command-can be control the society in which be lives? The answer is No! The political skill of man has been far outstripped by technical skill, and what lie has made he cannot be sure of controlling.”

Sukarno (1901–1970) first President of the Republic of Indonesia

Speech at the Opening of the Bandung Conference

Lie

“It is all a matter of comparing one’s own life with something worse and consoling oneself with the relativity of human fortunes. When I was eight or nine I had an experience which came clearly to mind when I read your advice. I used to know a family in a little village near mine: father, mother and sons: they were small landowners and had an inn. Very energetic people, especially the woman. I knew (I had heard) that besides the sons we knew, this woman had another son nobody had seen, who was spoken of in whispers, as if he were a great disgrace for the mother, an idiot, a monster or worse. I remember that my mother referred to this woman often as a martyr, who made great sacrifices for this son, and put up with great sorrows. One Sunday morning about ten, I was sent to this woman’s: I had to deliver some crocheting and get the money. I found her shutting the door, dressed up to go out to mass, she had a hamper under her arm. On seeing me she hesitated then decided. She told me to accompany her to a certain place, and that she would take delivery and give me the money on our return. She took me out of the village, into an orchard filled with rubbish and plaster; in one corner there was a sort of pig sty, about four feet high, and windowless, with only a strong door. She opened the door and I could hear an animal-like howling. Inside was her son, a robust boy of 18, who couldn’t stand up and hence scraped along on his seat to the door, as far as he was permitted to move by a chain linked to his waist and attached to the ring in the wall. He was covered with filth, and his eyes shone red, like those of a nocturnal animal. His mother dumped the contents of her basket – a mixed mess of household leftovers – into a stone trough. She filled another trough with water, and we left. I said nothing to my mother about what I had seen, so great an impression it had made on me, and so convinced was I that nobody would believe me. Nor when I later heard of the misery which had befallen that poor mother, did I interrupt to talk of the misery of the poor human wreck who had such a mother.”

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) Italian writer, politician, theorist, sociologist and linguist

Gramsci, 1965, p. 737 cited in Davidson, 1977, p. 35.

Life , Money , People , Family

“When that happens, and the “World’s Sole Remaining Superpower” loses its early-adopter advantage, drone technology will work to the advantage of the side with the most decentralized, distributed organizational infrastructure, and the most widely dispersed and hardened end-points. And it will disproportionately hurt the side with the most centralized, hierarchical form of organization and the most concentrated target profile. Anyone want to venture a guess as to which respective sides fit those descriptions? Imagine, if you will, a world in which drones are cheap and widely available. Then stop and think about the target profile of the Empire and the corporate interests it serves. Imagine how easy it would be to get targeting information on the homes, churches and country clubs of the senior management and directors of the aerospace companies that make American drones. The Boardrooms and C-Suites themselves. The factories. The whole South Asian chain of command, from CINC CENTCOM down to battalion and flight headquarters. The logistical tail of the drones, including the control centers at every airbase from which drones are staged. Begin to get the picture?”

Kevin Carson (1963) American academic

Bring on the Drones! (2013)
Other Writing

World , Home , Imagination , Thinking

“By committing a crime, a man places himself, of his own accord, outside the chain of eternal obligations which bind every human being to every other one. Punishment alone can weld him back again; fully so, if accompanied by consent on his part; otherwise only partially so. Just as the only way of showing respect for somebody suffering from hunger is to give him something to eat, so the only way of showing respect for somebody who has placed himself outside the law is to reinstate him inside the law by subjecting him to the punishment ordained by law.
The need for punishment is not satisfied where, as is generally the case, the penal code is merely a method of exercising pressure through fear.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Needs of the Soul (1949), p. 103

Hunger , Fear , Law , Way

“Whence this secret Chain between each Person and Mankind? How is my Interest connected with the most distant Parts of it?”

Francis Hutcheson (philosopher) (1694–1746) Irish philosopher

An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), Treatise II: An Inquiry concerning Moral Good and Evil, Sect. I

Secret , Distant , Parting , Personality

“When things go wrong, the standard management strategy is to decide who takes the blame. This should be an underling, as far down the chain as possible, but preferably with some visibility so people know management means business.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 9 (p. 78)

People , Business

“Anyway I be, holding this mic
And I'm restless
Lyrical bars, it comes quick like my first sex
I'm raw, no latex
I aint a slave, I'm a grown man
Fvck the chains and the necklace
Gat bad chicks everywhere, Casablanca
Noah flow, leave you in a state like Bayelsa
I poo in your mouth, you can talk that shyt
Guns like a cinema, it got clips”

Slim Burna (1988) Nigerian singer and record producer

"Real Recognize Real" (track 10)
I'm On Fire (2013)

Sex

“[G]enes make enzymes, and enzymes control the rates of chemical processes. Genes do not make “novelty seeking” or any other complex and overt behavior. Predisposition via a long chain of complex chemical reactions, mediated through a more complex series of life's circumstances, does not equal identification or even causation.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Lying Stones of Marrakech

"The Internal Brand of the Scarlet W", p. 282
The Lying Stones of Marrakech (2001)

Life , Behavior

“The essence of religion is inertia; the essence of science is change. It is the function of the one to preserve, it is the function of the other to improve. If, as in Egypt, they are firmly chained together, either science will advance, in which case the religion will be altered, or the religion will preserve its purity, and science will congeal.”

William Winwood Reade (1838–1875) British historian

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter I, "War", p. 27.

Religion , Science , Change

“Labourers had diminished, game had tripled. The landlord was no more necessary to agriculture than a gold chain to a watch.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech (late 1913), quoted in Thomas Jones, Lloyd George (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), p. 45.
Chancellor of the Exchequer

Game

“I envy thee, thou careless wind!
How light, how wild thy wandering :
Thou hast no earthly chain, to bind
One fetter on thy airy wing.”

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

(2nd August 1823) both from Songs
The London Literary Gazette, 1823

Light , Envy

“The United States of America will become the United States of Banana. And Puerto Rico will be the first half-and-half banana republic state incorporated that will secede from the union. Then will come Liberty Island, then Mississippi Burning, Texas BBQ, Kentucky Fried Chicken—all of them—New York Yankees, Jersey Devils—you name it—will want to break apart—and demand a separation—a divorce. Things will not go well for the banana republic when the shackles and chains of democracy break loose and unleash the dogs of war. Separation—divorce—disintegration of subject matters that don’t matter anymore—only verbs—actions. Americans will walk like chickens with their heads cut off.”

Giannina Braschi book United States of Banana

United States of Banana (2011)

War , Dogs , Democracy

“That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different it's course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for the moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.”

Charles Dickens book Great Expectations

Source: Great Expectations (1860-1861), Ch. 9

Life , Imagination , Flowers , Thinking

“Father, why is the sky blue?' - the child is not really interested in the sky as such; the real stake of the question is to expose father's impotence, his helplessness in the face of the hard fact, to present the whole chain of reasons leading to it. The blue of the sky thus becomes not only the father's problem, but in a way even his fault. The sky is blue, and you're just staring at it like an idiot incapable of doing anything about it!”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

203
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Way , Question , Problem

“According to … the French counterrevolutionaries and German Romantics, … the corpus of prejudices was a country’s cultural treasure, its ancient and tested intelligence, present as the consciousness and guardian of its thought. Prejudices were the “we” of every “I”, the past in the present, the revered vessels of the nation’s memory, its judgements carried from age to age. Pretending to spread enlightenment, the philosophes had set out to extirpate these precious residua. … The result was that they had uprooted men from their culture at the very moment when they bragged of how they would cultivate them. … Convinced that they were emancipating souls, they succeeded only in deracinating them. These calumniators of the commonplace had not freed understanding from its chains, but cut it off from its sources. The individual who, thanks to them, must now cast off childish things, had really abandoned his own nature. … The promises of the cogito were illusory: free from prejudice, cut off from the influence of national idiom, the subject was not free but shrivelled and devitalised. … Everyday opinion should therefore be regarded as the soil where thought was nourished, its hearth and sanctuary, … and not, as the philosophes would have it, as some alien authority which overwhelmed and crushed it. … The cogito needed to be steeped in the profundities of the collective mind; the broken links with the past needed repairing; the quest for independence should yield to that for authenticity. Men should abandon their scepticism and give themselves over to the comforting warmth of majoritarian ideas, bowing down before their infallible authority.”

Alain Finkielkraut (1949) French essayist, born 1949

Source: The Undoing of Thought (1988), pp. 25-26.

Men , Age , Soul , Intelligence

“I dreamed a dream, that I had flung a chain
Of roses around Love,—I woke, and found
I had chained Sorrow.”

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

The Literary Souvenir, 1826 (1825) The Forsaken
Other Gift Books

Love , Dreams

“We wouldn't attempt to meditate, or engage in any other contemplative practice, if we didn't feel that something about our experience needed to be improved. But here lies one of the central paradoxes of spiritual life, because this very feeling of dissatisfaction causes us to overlook the intrinsic freedom of consciousness in the present. As we have seen, there are good reasons to believe that adopting a practice like meditation can lead to positive changes in one's life. But the deepest goal of spirituality is freedom from the illusion of the self—and to seek such freedom, as though it were a future state to be attained through effort, is to reinforce the chains of one's apparent bondage in each moment.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Source: 2010s, Waking Up (2014), Ch. 4

Life , Feeling , Effort , Freedom

“You've got your ball,
You've got your chain.
Tied to me tight, tie me up again.
Who's got their claws
In you my friend?
Into your heart, I'll beat again.
Sweet like candy to my soul,
Sweet you rock
And sweet you roll.
Lost for you, I'm so lost for you.”

Dave Matthews (1967) American singer-songwriter, musician and actor

Crash into Me
Crash (1996)

Soul , Heart

“The fundamental objective of the science of administration is the accomplishment of the work in hand with the least expenditure of man-power and materials. Efficiency is thus axiom number one in the value scale of administration. This brings administration into apparent conflict with certain elements of the value scale of politics, whether we use that term in its scientific or in its popular sense. But both public administration and politics are branches of political science, so that we are in the end compelled to mitigate the pure concept of efficiency in the light of the value scale of politics and the social order. There are, for example, highly inefficient arrangements like citizen boards and small local governments which may be necessary in a democracy as educational devices. It has been argued also that the spoils system, which destroys efficiency in administration, is needed to maintain the political party, that the political party is needed to maintain the structure of government, and that without the structure of government, administration itself will disappear. While this chain of causation has been disproved under certain conditions, it none the less illustrates the point that the principles of politics may seriously affect efficiency. Similarly in private business it is often true that the necessity for immediate profits growing from the system of private ownership may seriously interfere with the achievement of efficiency in practice.”

Luther H. Gulick (1892–1993) American academic

Source: "Science, values and public administration," 1937, p. 192-193

Education , Democracy , Business , Sense

“The Mathematics which effectually exercises, not vainly deludes or vexatiously torments studious Minds with obscure Subtilties, perplexed Difficulties, or contentious Disquisitions; which overcomes without Opposition, triumphs without Pomp, compels without Force, and rules absolutely without Loss of Liberty; which does not privately overreach a weak Faith, but openly assaults an armed Reason, obtains a total Victory, and puts on inevitable Chains; whose Words are so many Oracles, and Works as many Miracles; which blabs out nothing rashly, nor designs anything from the Purpose, but plainly demonstrates and readily performs all Things within its Verge; which obtrudes no false Shadow of Science, but the very Science itself, the Mind firmly adheres to it, as soon as possessed of it, and can never after desert it of its own Accord, or be deprived of it by any Force of others: Lastly the Mathematics, which depend upon Principles clear to the Mind, and agreeable to Experience; which draws certain Conclusions, instructs by profitable Rules, unfolds pleasant Questions; and produces wonderful Effects; which is the fruitful Parent of, I had almost said all, Arts, the 47 unshaken Foundation of Sciences, and the plentiful Fountain of Advantage to human Affairs.”

Isaac Barrow (1630–1677) English Christian theologian, and mathematician

"Ration before the University of Cambridge on being elected Lucasian Professor of Mathematics," (1660), reported in: Mathematical Lectures, (1734), p. 28

Faith , Art , Exercises , Mathematics

“I regard the whole of arithmetic as a necessary, or at least natural, consequence of the simplest arithmetic act, that of counting, and counting itself as nothing else than the successive creation of the infinite series of positive integers in which each individual is defined by the one immediately preceding; the simplest act is the passing from an already-formed individual to the consecutive new one to be formed. The chain of these numbers forms in itself an exceedingly useful instrument for the human mind; it presents an inexhaustible wealth of remarkable laws obtained by the introduction of the four fundamental operations of arithmetic.”

Richard Dedekind (1831–1916) German mathematician

p, 125
Stetigkeit und irrationale Zahlen (1872)

Law , Nature , Success , Wealth

“In the process of decision those alternatives are chosen which are considered to be appropriate means of reaching desired ends. Ends themselves, however, are often merely instrumental to more final objectives. We are thus led to the conception of a series, or hierarchy, of ends. Rationality has to do with the construction of means-ends chains of this kind.”

Herbert A. Simon book Administrative Behavior

Source: 1940s-1950s, Administrative Behavior, 1947, p. 62.

Decision

“Not it is different with type 14 vehicles. They move through their world with consistent determination, always clearly after something that very often we cannot guess at the outset - something that may not even be there when the vehicle reaches the place it wants to get to. But it seems to be a good strategy, this running after a dream. Most of the time the chain of optimistic predicitions that seems to guide the vehicles's behaviour proves to be correct, and Vehicle 14 achieves goals that Vehicle 13 and its predecessors "couldn't not even dream of." The point is that while the vehicle goes through its optimistic predicitions, the succession of internal states implies movements and actions of the vehicle itself. While dreaming and sleepwalking, the vehicle transforms the world (and its own position in the world) in such a way that ultimately the state of the world is a more favorable one.”

Valentino Braitenberg (1926–2011) Italian-Austrian neuroscientist

As cited in: [ http://transit-port.net/Citations/index.html Citations] at transit-port.net, 2013
Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology (1984)

World , Dreams , Way , Time

“In the study of such events we do well to remember that the hand once nailed to the tree holds the chain that binds the past, the present, and the future. His way is in the sea, His path is in the great waters, and His footsteps are not known. But wisdom marks His plans; truth and justice attend their development, and out of seeming evil He brings triumphant good.”

John Lanahan (1815–1903)

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 425.

Wisdom , Truth , Justice , Way

“At the point at which the concept of différance, and the chain attached to it, intervenes, all the conceptual oppositions of metaphysics (signifier/signified; sensible/intelligible; writing/speech; passivity/activity; etc.)- to the extent that they ultimately refer to the presence of something present (for example, in the form of the identity of the subject who is present for all his operations, present beneath every accident or event, self-present in its "living speech," in its enunciations, in the present objects and acts of its language, etc.)- become non pertinent. They all amount, at one moment or another, to a subordination of the movement of différance in favor of the presence of a value or a meaning supposedly antecedent to différance, more original than it, exceeding and governing it in the last analysis. This is still the presence of what we called above the "transcendental signified.”

Jacques Derrida book Positions

Source: Positions (1982), p. 29

Intelligence

“Circumstantial evidence, Markham, is the utt‘rest tommyrot imag‘nable. Its theory is not unlike that of our present-day democracy. The democratic theory is that if you accumulate enough ignorance at the polls, you produce intelligence; and the theory of circumst‘ntial evidence is that if you accumulate a sufficient number of weak links, you produce a strong chain.”

S. S. Van Dine book The Benson Murder Case

Source: The Benson Murder Case (1926), Ch. 22

Democracy , Intelligence , Strong

“Leadership is the form that authority assumes when it enters into process. As such it constitutes the determining principle of the entire scalar process, existing not only at the source, but projecting itself through its own action throughout the entire chain, until, through functional definition, it effectuates the formal coordination of the entire structure.”

James D. Mooney (1884–1957) American businessman

Source: Onward Industry!, 1931, p. 33

“The members of this Eternal Republic have no origin but their purely logical one of reference to each other, including thus their primary reference to God. That is, in the literal sense of the word, they have no origin at all — no source in time whatever. There is nothing at all, prior to them, out of which their being arises; they are not "things" in the chain of efficient causation. They simply are, and together constitute the eternal order.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Preface to First Edition, p.xiv

God , Sense , Time

“They were brought out of Africa and into chains in America. Or they were born into slavery here. Yes, I am talking about the first African-Americans to reach these shores, but I am also describing the animals now enslaved in circuses. The species and continents are different, but the stories are tragically similar. The animals in circuses are held against their will by chains and domination. They are forced to perform a series of acts by coercion and violence because they would never normally do these things on their own. They can never choose their own partners, their own homes, their own food or have control over any aspect of their lives. I don't care how this is dressed up by promoters with music and lights, it is still slavery.”

Richard Pryor (1940–2005) American stand-up comedian, actor, social critic, writer, and MC

Wrote in November 2005, criticizing a black-owned circus; as quoted in "Pryor Fought Animal Abuse" by Lisa Lange, in Albuquerque Journal (15 December 2005) https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/206590625/

Food , Music , Home , Light

“You should be glad that the government has provided for chain and bangles at their own expense, why are you feeling so bad about it?”

Kalki Krishnamurthy (1899–1954) writer

Comment made to his mother and aunt while he was shackled in jail for his political activities, as quoted in "Anandi Speaks On Kalki's Works" at chennaibest.com http://www.chennaibest.com/cityresources/books_and_hobbies/anandhi.asp

Feeling

“Shall I now ask these palette-slaves what poetry means, and in how many forms it appears to us? They want to chain her [poetry], just as they are tied up themselves to their master's palette, [or] to some part of the sacred history.... to a folktale.... a miraculous landscape.... or other pompous imaginations.”

Barend Cornelis Koekkoek (1803–1862) painter from the Northern Netherlands

(original Dutch, citaat van B.C. Koekkoek:) Zal ik nu deze palet-slaven vragen, wat poezij is, en onder hoe vele vormen zij zich aan ons vertoont of voordoet? Zij willen haar gekluisterd hebben, evenals zij aan het palet van hun meester gebonden zijn, aan het een of andere gedeelte der gewijde geschiedenis.. ..aan ene volkslegende.. ..een wonder vreemd landschap.. ..en meer andere hoogdravende voorstellingen.
Koekkoek refers to the German painters who rejected the Dutch (often more realistic) landscape-painters, as 'non-poetic' artists]
Source: Herinneringen aan en Mededeelingen van…' (1841), p. 28

Imagination , History , Appearance , Parting

“Stealing a bicycle chain as the handlebars crashed to the ground,
And the back wheel detached from the frame, it kept rolling, yeah,
But aimlessly drifting around.”

Aaron Weiss

Four-Word Letter, Pt 2.
Catch For Us The Foxes (2004)

“The chief character in this narrative is the Caribbean Sea, one of the world's most alluring bodies of water, a rare gem among the oceans, defined by the islands that form a chain of lovely jewels to the north and east.”

James A. Michener book Caribbean

Caribbean (1989) First lines

Love , World , Water , Sea

“We evolved to be good at learning and using rules of thumb, not at searching for ultimate causes and making fine distinctions. Still less did we evolve to spin out long chains of calculation that connect fundamental laws to observable consequences. Computers are much better at it!”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

Source: The Lightness of Being – Mass, Ether and the Unification of Forces (2008), Ch. 1, p. 8.

Law , Search , Learning

“Competition has been curtailed by larger corporations; it has been sabotaged by groups of smaller entrepreneurs acting collectively. Both groups have made clear the locus of liberalism's rhetoric of small business and family farm.The character and ideology of the small entrepreneur and the facts of the market are selling the idea of competition short. These liberal heroes, the small businessmen and the farmer, do not want to develop their characters by free and open competition; they do not believe in competition, and they have been doing their best to get away from it.When the small businessmen are asked whether they think free competition is…a good thing, they answer…, 'Yes, of course—what do you mean?' … Finally: 'How about here in this town in furniture?'—or groceries, or whatever the man's line is. Their answers are of two sorts: 'Yes, if it's fair competition,' which turns out to mean: 'if it doesn't make me compete.' … The small businessman, as well as the farmer, wants to become big, not directly by eating up others like himself in competition, but by the indirect ways means practiced by his own particular heroes—those already big. In the dream life of the small entrepreneur, the sure fix is replacing the open market.But if small men wish to close their ranks, why do they continue to talk…about free competition? The answer is that the political function of free competition is what really matters now…[f]or, if there is free competition and a constant coming and going of enterprises, the one who remains established is 'the better man' and 'deserves to be where he is.' But if instead of such competition, there is a rigid line between successful entrepreneurs and the employee community, the man on top may be 'coasting on what his father did,' and not really be worthy of his hard-won position. Nobody talks more of free enterprise and competition and of the best man winning than the man who inherited his father's store or farm. …… In Congress small-business committees clamored for legislation to save the weak backbone of the national economy. Their legislative efforts have been directed against their more efficient competitors. First they tried to kill off the low-priced chain stores by taxation; then they tried to eliminate the alleged buying advantages of mass distributor; finally they tried to freeze the profits of all distributors in order to protect their own profits from those who could and were selling goods cheaper to the consumer.The independent retailer…has been pushing to maintain a given margin under the guise of 'fair competition' and 'fair-trade' laws. He now regularly demands that the number of outlets controlled by chain stores be drastically limited and that production be divorced from distribution. This would, of course, kill the low prices charged consumers by the A&P;, which makes very small retail profits, selling almost at cost, and whose real profits come from the manufacturing and packaging.…Under the threat of 'ruinous competition,' laws are on the books of many states and cities legalizing the ruin of competition.”

C. Wright Mills book White Collar: The American Middle Classes

Section One: The Competitive Way of Life.
White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951)

Life , Men , Books , Family

“Perfect was Gweir's prison in the Faery Fort.
Due to the ministry of Pwyll and Pryderi
none before him had entered therein.
In the heavy blue chain a faithful servant kept him
and for the Spoils of Annwfn keenly he chanted
and unto Doom shall continue in bard-orison.
Three fulnesses of Prydwen we entered in:
Save for seven none came up from Fort Faery.”

Taliesin (534–599) Welsh bard

Book of Taliesin (c. 1275?), The Spoils of Annwn

Faith , Perfection

“Derangement is the signature expression of the Great Backlash, a style of conservatism that first came snarling onto the national stage in response to the partying and protests of the late sixties. While earlier forms of conservatism emphasized fiscal sobriety, the backlash mobilizes voters with explosive social issues — summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art — which it then marries to pro-business economic polices. Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends. And it is these economic achievements — not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars — that are the movement’s greatest monuments. The backlash is what has made possible the international free-market consensus of recent years, with all the privatization, deregulation, and de-unionization that are its components. Backlash ensures that Republicans will continue to be returned to office even when their free-market miracles fail and their libertarian schemes don’t deliver and their "New Economy" collapses. It makes possible the police pushers’ fantasies of “globalization” and a free-trade empire that are foisted upon the rest of the world with such self-assurance. Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire plant must remake itself along the lines preferred by the Republican Party, U. S. A.The Great Backlash has made the laissez-faire revival possible, but this does not mean that it speak to us in the manner of the capitalists of old, invoking the divine right of money or demanding that the lowly learn their place in the great chain of being. On the contrary; the backlash imagines itself as a foe of the elite, as the voice of the unfairly persecuted, as a righteous protest of the people on history’s receiving end. That is champions today control all three branches of government matters not a whit. That is greatest beneficiaries are the wealthiest people on the plant does not give it pause.”

Thomas Frank book What's the Matter with Kansas?

Introduction: What's the Matter with America (pp. 5-6).
What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004)

Money , War , People , World

“Businessmen are the one group that distinguishes capitalism and the American way of life from the totalitarian statism that is swallowing the rest of the world. All the other social groups- workers, farmers, professional men, scientists, soldiers- exist under dictatorships, even though they exist in chains, in terror, in misery, and in progressive self-destruction. But there is no such group as businessmen under a dictatorship. Their place is taken by armed thugs: by bureaucrats and commissars. Businessmen are the symbol of a free society- the symbol of America.”

Ayn Rand book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)

Life , Men , World , Way

“So what am I doing? Well I hope that by providing a personal insight into my own journey into greater understanding you will accept my bona fides in this matter. I am deadly serious about this. In an organisation built on a chain of command, senior leaders can make a very real difference when they are determined to implement change, and they are.”

David Morrison (1956) Australian army general

Address at the International Women's Day Conference (2013)

Hope , Understanding , Change , Personality

“The people are asleep; they remain indifferent. They forge their own chains and do the bidding of their masters to crucify their Christs.”

Emma Goldman book Living My Life

Source: Living My Life (1931), p. 304

People , Christ , Indifference

“Alice In Chains: Love, Sex, Pain And Suffering… Interview conducted by Ian McFarlane in 1991”

Layne Staley (1967–2002) American singer

Love , Pain , Sex , Suffering

“Kane gazed, awed. This was truly a hell on earth. As in a nightmare he looked into the roaring red cauldron where black insects fought against their doom and perished. The flames leaped a hundred feet in the air, and suddenly above their roar sounded one bestial, inhuman scream like a shriek from across nameless gulfs of cosmic space, as one vampire, dying, broke the chains of silence which had held him for untold centuries. High and haunting it rose, the death cry of a vanishing race.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"The Hills of the Dead" (1930)

Death , Hell , Silence , Cry

“My life is like a music-hall,
Where, in the impotence of rage,
Chained by enchantment to my stall,
I see myself upon the stage
Dance to amuse a music-hall.”

Arthur Symons (1865–1945) British poet

In The Stalls , st. 1.

Life , Music , Rage , Dance

“Take note of those who spout false opinions about the gracious gift of Jesus Christ that has come to us, and see how they are opposed to the mind of God. They have no interest in love, in the widow, the orphan, the oppressed, the one who is in chains or the one set free, the one who is hungry or the one who thirsts.”

Ignatius of Antioch (35–108) Patriarch of Antioch and martyr saint

6:6-7, as translated by B. D. Ehrman, The Apostolic Fathers, Loeb Classical Library (2003), p. 303
Epistle to the Smyrnaeans

Love , God , Christ , Falseness

“The feeling of uneasiness and insecurity, if not bound by the chains of some sect, is general. It is begotten of the false idea, first promulgated by Papacy, that membership in an earthly organization is essential, pleasing to the Lord and necessary to everlasting life. These earthly, humanly organized systems, so different from the simple, unfettered associations of the days of the apostles, are viewed involuntarily an almost unconsciously by Christian people as so many Heaven Insurance Companies, to some one of which money, time, respect, etc., must be paid regularly, to secure heavenly rest and peace after death. Acting on this false idea, people are almost as nervously anxious to be bound by another sect, if they step out of one, as they are if their policy of insurance has expired, to have it renewed in some respectable company.”

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

Source: Milennial Dawn, Vol. III: Thy Kingdom Come (1891), p. 186.

Life , Death , Money , People

“The chains that bind us most closely are the ones we have broken.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Las cadenas que más nos encadenan son las cadenas que hemos roto.
Voces (1943)

“Chains, my baby's got me locked up in chains
And they ain't the kind that you can see
Woh these chains of love got a hold on me yeah.”

Carole King (1942) Nasa

Chains (1962), Co-written with Gerry Goffin, first performed by The Cookies
Song lyrics, Singles

Love , Baby

“For each of us, as for the robin in Michigan or the Salmon in the Miramichi, this is a problem of ecology, of interrelationships, of interdependence. We poison the caddis flies in a stream and the salmon runs dwindle and die. We poison the gnats in a lake and the poison travels from link to link of the food chain and soon the birds of the lake margins become its victims. We spray our elms and the following springs are silent of robin song, not because we sprayed the robins directly but because the poison traveled, step by step, through the now familiar elm leaf-earthworm-robin cycle. These are matters of record, observable, part of the visible world around us. They reflect the web of life — or death — that scientists know as ecology.”

Rachel Carson book Silent Spring

Source: Silent Spring (1962), p. 189

Life , Death , World , Food

““I have not slept well since I first entered my brother’s dungeons. While my comfort has improved since then, worry has taken the place of hanging in chains as a denier of rest.”
“There are many kinds of imprisonment,” Jarnauga nodded.”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, The Dragonbone Chair (1988), Chapter 43, “The Harrowing” (p. 739).

“While we find such endless differences between the actions of different men under the same temptations, or of the same man at different times, we shall yet be unable to find any link of the chain undetermined by the action of the outward circumstance on the inner law; or any point where we can say a power lay in the individual will of choosing either of two courses — in other words, to discover sin. Actions are governed by motives. The power of motives depends on character, and character on the original faculties and the training which they have received from the men or things among which they have been bred.
Sin, therefore, as commonly understood, is a chimera.”

James Anthony Froude book The Nemesis of Faith

Fragments of Markham's notes
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)

Men , Law , Motivation , Time

“Liberation from enslavement to interest on money is the clear motto for the global revolution, for the liberation of productive labor from the chains of the supragovernmental money-powers.”

Gottfried Feder (1883–1941) German economist and politician

"Manifesto for the Abolition of Enslavement to Interest on Money" (1919)

Money

“Only now did the scales fall from my eyes. For how great is the force of credulity, how powerful the suggestion of terror! Such incomprehension! But this was a man! A chained-up man, whom I, by incomprehensible means, in a simplifying, metaphorical, and comprehensive elision, had taken for a dog.”

Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) Polish novelist and painter

“The Sanatorium at the Sign of the Hourglass” http://www.schulzian.net/translation/sanatorium/sanatorium1.htm
His father, Living things

Dogs

“At dawn, a railwaywoman
On a country platform whirls on the end of a chain
An irrelevant key, while a young guard makes to wipe
A crumb from her lapel; and see, she smiles
A permissory smile you take in from your corner seat:
A cameo of unrehearsed perfection.”

Alan Brownjohn (1931) British writer

The Old Flea-Pit (1987).

Smile , Perfection , Country

“The linguistic entity is not accurately defined until it is delimited, i. e. separated from everything that surrounds it on the phonic chain. These delimited entities or units stand in opposition to each other in the mechanism of language.
One is at first tempted to liken linguistic signs to visual signs, which can exist in space without becoming confused, and to assume that separation of the significant elements can be accomplished in the same way, without recourse to any mental process. The word "form," which is often used to indicate them (cf. the expression "verbal form," "noun form") gives support to the mistake. But we know that the main characteristic of the sound-chain is that it is linear.”

Ferdinand de Saussure book Course in General Linguistics

Source: Cours de linguistique générale (1916), p. 103

Way , Support

“All day long they work so hard
Till the sun is goin' down.
Working on the highways and byways
And wearing, wearing a frown.
You hear them moanin' their lives away.
Then you hear somebody say:"That's the sound of the men working on the chain gang.
That's the sound of the men working on the chain gang."”

Sam Cooke (1931–1964) American singer-songwriter and entrepreneur

Chain Gang
Song lyrics, Singles

Men , Sun

“I hope when he dies, he does become a tree. I hope he's in the middle of the wilderness and he's doing his tree thing. Whatever it is trees do. I know they do a lot of work with breezes. And wouldn't it be fantastic if while he was out there just enjoying his treeness, through the woods, a huge sweaty guy with an ax comes long? Sees him… [tree-chopping motions]. Chops him down, smash! Put a chain around him, drag him through the mud and the muck, throw him into a sawmill and grind him up. [Nuzzsaw noise] Then you pound him down into paper, and once he's paper, you print the Bible on him.”

Dane Cook (1972) American actor and comedian

Vicious Circle (2006)

Hope , Guy , Tree

“If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us. The free mind is not a barking dog, to be tethered on a ten-foot chain.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

Speech at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (8 October 1952)

Dogs , Search , Knowledge

“They make you and you have no say in it. It’s w:Godot all the time. A chain around your neck and the whip cracking behind you.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

1960's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde' (1965 - 1969)

Time

“[T]he word "eternal" must by him be taken to stand for what "temporal" does not and cannot stand for; namely, the unchangeable Ground presupposed by the changing temporal; the necessary as against the contingent; the independent as against the dependent; the primary as against the derivative; the self-existent as against that which exists in and through it; the genuine cause, the causa sui, as against that which is after all nothing but effect, however it may be tied, by the causa sui, in an unrupturable chain of antecedent and consequent. Or we may say it means the noumenon as against the phenomenon; or, in fine, the thing in itself as against the thing in other. That is, the relation between the eternal and the temporal is not, and cannot be, only another case of the temporal relation. The relation is just one of pure reason, and is, in fact, sui generis: the eternal does not precede the temporal by date, but only in logic; it is the sine qua non without which the temporal cannot exist, nor is even conceivable. In brief, throughout my book I mean by the "eternal" simply the Real as contrasted with the apparent; the world of self-active causes as contrasted with the world of derivative effects, in so far passive.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Appendix D: Reply to a Review in the New York Tribune, p.412-3

Books , World , Change , Dependency

“A man is the sum of his ancestors; to reform him you must begin with a dead ape and work downward through a million graves. He is like the lower end of a suspended chain; you can sway him slightly to the right or the left, but remove your hand and he falls into line with the other links.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

Source: Epigrams, p. 363

Dead

“It is because the English education system in Ireland had deliberately eliminated the national factor that it has so terrifically succeeded. For it has succeeded - succeeded in making slaves of us. And it has succeeded so well that we no longer realise that we are slaves. Some of us even think our chains ornamental, and are a little doubtful as to whether we shall be quite as comfortable and quite as respectable when they are hacked off.”

Patrick Pearse (1879–1916) Irish revolutionary, shot by the British Army in 1916

The Murder Machine

Education , Thinking

“Mexico is a nineteenth-century country arranged for gaslight. Once brought into the harsh light of the twentieth-century media, Mexico can only seem false. In its male, in its public, its city aspect, Mexico is an arch-tranvestite, a tragic buffoon. Dogs bark and babies cry when Mother Mexico walks abroad in the light of day. The policeman, the Marxist mayor — Mother Mexico doesn't even bother to shave her mustachios. Swords and rifles and spurs and bags of money chink and clatter beneath her skirts. A chain of martyred priests dangles from her waist, for she is an austere, pious lady. Ay, how much — clutching her jangling bosoms; spilling cigars — how much she has suffered.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

"Night and Day" in Frontiers (1990)

Money , Dogs , Light , Suffering

“It was my sophomore year at Yale, going through the food line for dinner, and I wanted a chicken breast, but the way they put it on my plate – all of a sudden it reminded me of my mom’s dog – and at that moment I was instantly on the outside of the food chain. I just couldn’t be a part of it. It was very personal to me in an instant, all because of a big breast of chicken that was oddly plated and slightly pink and I couldn’t do it. At first all I could think to eat was peanut butter and bread, so I put on a bunch of weight, but over the years it’s gotten a lot easier because people are much hipper to the fact that a plant based lifestyle is healthier for us. So it’s gotten so easy and so delicious to be vegan.”

Bellamy Young (1970) American artist

"Bellamy Young: The First Lady of Scandal Talks Animals, Veganism and Random Acts of Kindness", interview with The Pet Press (November 2013) http://www.thepetpress-la.com/bellamy-young.html.

People , Food , Dogs , Way

“In a business world that is changing faster than ever before, the top performing firms create a stable base – they digitize their core processes and embed those processes into a foundation for execution. This stable foundation makes a company both more efficient and more agile than its competitors. With global supply chains, pressure for ever faster time to market, more complex regulation, and huge shifts in customer demographics and desires, companies cannot predict the future. But they can decide what makes them great. And then they can create a low cost, high quality core of stability and constancy in a turbulent world. With a strong digitized core great companies slide smoothly into the next opportunity while their competitors stumble.”

Jeanne W. Ross (1958) American computer scientist

p, viii
Enterprise architecture as strategy, 2006

World , Business , Strong , Change

“Like the government, corporations must be bound with the chains of the Constitution, and especially of the Bill of Rights.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"How Many Americans Does It Take to Change a Dim Bulb?"

“I took a walk with my fame down memory lane / I never did find my way back"
Feel no shame / 'coz time's no chain"”

Noel Gallagher (1967) British musician

Hey Now
(What's the Story) Morning Glory? (1995)

Way , Feeling , Memory , Time

“He who possesses the divine powers of the soul is a great being, be his place what it may. You may clothe him with rags, may immure him in a dungeon, may chain him to slavish tasks. But he is still great.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Self-Culture (1838)

Soul , Clothes

“History, in [Nietzsche’s] view, belongs to him who is fighting a great fight, and who needs examples, teachers and comforters, but cannot find them among his contemporaries. Without history the mountain chain of great men’s great moments, which runs through millennia, could not stand clearly and vividly before me.”

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), p. 17

Men , History , Mountain , Teachers

“I return link by link along the iron chains of memory to the city which we inhabited so briefly together:the city which used us as its flora-precipitated in us conflicts which were hers and which we mistook for our own:beloved Alexandria!”

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Justine (1957)

Memory

“Science has long been in the value business. Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, scientific validity is not the result of scientists abstaining from making value judgments; rather, scientific validity is the result of scientists making their best efforts to value principles of reasoning that link their beliefs to reality, through reliable chains of evidence and argument. This is how norms of rational thought are made effective… The answer to the question "What should I believe, and why should I believe it?"”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

is generally a scientific one.
Source: 2010s, The Moral Landscape (2010), p. 143–144

Question , Business , Reality , Effort

“It is difficult to pronounce on the opinion of the ministers of our Church as a body: one portion of them, by far the least informed, protests against anything which can advance the honour and the interests of science, because, in their limited and mistaken view, science is adverse to religion. This is not the place to argue that great question. It is sufficient to remark, that the best-informed and most enlightened men of all creeds and pursuits, agree that truth can never damage truth, and that every truth is allied indissolubly by chains more or less circuitous with all other truths; whilst error, at every step we make in its diffusion, becomes not only wider apart and more discordant from all truths, but has also the additional chance of destruction from all rival errors.”

Charles Babbage (1791–1871) mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable c…

Source: The Exposition of 1851: Views Of The Industry, The Science, and the Government Of England, 1851, p. 225

Men , Truth , Religion , Error

“If this world is wearing thin
And you're thinking of escape
I'll go anywhere with you
Just wrap me up in chains
But if you try to go alone
Don't think I'll understand (Stay) Stay with me”

Siobhan Fahey (1958) singer and songwriter in Banarama and Shakespears Sister

"Stay" (written with Marcella Detroit and David A. Stewart) - Video and full text online http://viddigger.blogspot.com/2007/04/shakespears-sister-stay.html
Hormonally Yours (1992)

World , Understanding , Thinking

“We should not pretend to be what we are not. The pretence of the impartial investigation of truth, with the resolve to make the established religion the result, indeed the measure and control of truth, is intolerable and such a philosophy, tied to the established religion like a dog to a chain, is only the vexatious caricature of the highest and noblest endeavor of mankind.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

Man wolle nicht scheinen was man nicht ist. Das Vorgeben unbefangener Wahrheitsforschung, mit dem Entschluß, die Landesreligion zum Resultat, ja zum Maaßstabe und zur Kontrole derselben zu machen, ist unerträglich, und eine solche, an die Landesreligion, wie der Kettenhund an die Mauer, gebundene Philosophie ist nur das ärgerliche Zerrbild der höchsten und edelsten Bestrebung der Menschheit.
Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 5, pp. 155–156, E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 143
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), On Philosophy in the Universities

Truth , Religion , Dogs

“The Faerie Queene is the most extended and extensive meditation on sex in the history of poetry. It charts the entire erotic spectrum, a great chain of being rising from matter to spirit, from the coarsest lust to chastity and romantic idealism. The poem’s themes of sex and politics are parallel: the psyche, like society, must be disciplined by good government. Spenser agrees with the classical and Christian philosophers on the primacy of reason over animal appetites. He looks forward to the Romantic poets, however, in the way that he shows the sex impulse as ultimately daemonic and barbaric, breeding witches and sorcerers of evil allure. Like the Odyssey, The Faerie Queene is a heroic epic in which the masculine must evade female traps or delays.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 188

Sex , Way , History , Evil

“I understood that it was only the very best in us, our capacity for love and self-respect, that enabled us to survive in a perpetually fragmenting multiverse. Only our deepest sense of justice allowed us to remain sane and relish the wonders of chaotic Time and Space, to be free at least of fear. Further violence would bring only an endless chain of bloodshed and an inevitable descent of our race into bestiality and ultimate insentience. To survive, we must love.”

Michael Moorcock book The Steel Tsar

Book 2, Chapter 7 “A Mechanical Man” (pp. 388-389)
The Steel Tsar (1981)

Love , Fear , Justice , Sense

“I heard a heavy step approaching behind the great door, and saw through the chinks the gleam of a coming light. Then there was the sound of rattling chains and the clanking of massive bolts drawn back. A key was turned with the loud grating noise of long disuse, and the great door swung back.
Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere. He held in his hand an antique silver lamp, in which the flame burned without a chimney or globe of any kind, throwing long quivering shadows as it flickered in the draught of the open door. The old man motioned me in with his right hand with a courtly gesture, saying in excellent English, but with a strange intonation.
"Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own free will!"”

Bram Stoker book Dracula

Jonathan Harker's journal
Dracula (1897)

Light , Housing

“If we seriously contemplate life it appears an agony too great to be supported, but for the most part our minds gloss such things over & until the ice finally lets us through we skate about merrily enough. Most people, I'm convinced, don't think about life at all. They grab what they think they want and the subsequent consequences keep them busy in an endless chain till they're carried out feet first.”

Philip Larkin (1922–1985) English poet, novelist, jazz critic and librarian

Source: Letter to J.B.Sutton 30 October 1949

Life , People , Business , Support

“We know that these challenges can be overcome because history moves in the direction of justice. The evils of slavery were accepted and unchanged for centuries, yet eventually the human heart would not abide them. There is a voice of conscience and hope in every man and woman that will not be silenced, what Martin Luther King called a certain kind of fire that no water could put out. That flame could not be extinguished at the Birmingham jail. It could not be stamped out at Robben Island prison. It was seen in the darkness here at Goree Island, where no chain could bind the soul. This untamed fire of justice continues to burn in the affairs of man, and it lights the way before us. May God bless you all.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2003, Hope and Conscience Will Not Be Silenced (July 2003)

God , Justice , Hope , Way

“The world is full of people whom no one has put in chains but who bind themselves with frozen thoughts and fears. A man whose mind conforms to the conditioned responses of his daily life is a coward and a slave. **The Rules of Chaos (1969), p 84”

Stephen Vizinczey (1933) Hungarian-Canadian writer

Life , People , World , Fear

“The elevation of the belief in being white was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates book Between the World and Me

Source: Between the World and Me (2015), p. 8.

Life , Children , Family , Wine

“Where'er I roam, whatever realms I see,
My heart untraveled fondly turns to thee;
Still to my brother turns with ceaseless pain,
And drags at each remove a lengthening chain.”

Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774) Irish physician and writer

Source: The Traveller (1764), Line 7.

Pain , Heart

“I am here to plead his cause with you. I plead not for his life, but for his character — his immortal life; and so it becomes your cause wholly, and is not his in the least. Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light.”

Henry David Thoreau book A Plea for Captain John Brown

A Plea for Captain John Brown (1859)

Life , Angels , Light , Christ

“Even on the white English crags
A few strong spirits, in a race that binds
Its body in chains and calls them Liberty,
And calls each fresh link Progress, stood erect
With faces pale that hunger'd to the light.”

Robert Williams Buchanan (1841–1901) Scottish poet, novelist and dramatist

Political Mystics. Titan and Avatar.

Light , Strong

“Commerce was meant by the goodness of the Deity to diffuse the various goods of the earth into every part, to unite mankind in the blessed chains of brotherly love, society, and mutual dependence: the enlightened Christian should diffuse the riches of the Gospel of peace, with the commodities of his respective land. Commerce attended with strict honesty, and with Religion for its companion, would be a blessing to every shore it touched at. In Africa, the poor wretched natives, blessed with the most fertile and luxuriant soil, are rendered so much the more miserable for what Providence meant as a blessing: the Christians' abominable traffic for slaves, and the horrid cruelty and treachery of the petty Kings- encouraged by their Christian customers- who carry them strong liquors, to enflame their national madness, and powder, and bad fire-arms, to furnish them with the hellish means of killing and kidnapping. But enough- it is a subject that sours my blood”

Ignatius Sancho (1729–1780) British composer, writer and grocer

(from vol 2, letter 1: some time in 1778, to Mr J___ W___e [actually Jack Wingrave, a young man recently gone to work in India, who was distressed by the corruption he found there]).

Love , Peace , Religion , Strong

“I proclaim with confidence that Britain can get right back into the world competitive race if only we can break free of the collective chains which hold us back. Unlike the socialists, who trust the state, we trust the people. That is why we are the party of freedom.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Article for the News of the World (29 April 1979) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104052
Leader of the Opposition

People , World , Confidence , Freedom

“Q: I have read that you also, at least sometimes, had a chain around your neck, and you were tied to a tree?
A: M-hm. Most of the time, I would say.
Q: Were you tortured?
A: There are things that I don't want to talk about.
Q: Were there any other women among the hostages?
A: There were more women among the hostages, but the last four years of my captivity I was the only woman on the camp, so it was very difficult.”

Íngrid Betancourt (1961) Colombian-French politician

Reference http://svtplay.se/v/1416302/rakt_pa_med_kg_bergstrom/1_av_10?cb,a1364145,1,f,103521/pb,a1364142,1,f,103521/pl,v,,1430389/sb,p103521,1,f,-1
Interview with KG Bergström for Sveriges Television

Women , Tree , Time , Reading