Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind.
Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind.
Being, belief and reason are pure relations, which cannot be dealt with absolutely, and are not things but pure scholastic concepts, signs for understanding, not for worshipping, aids to awaken our attention, not to fetter it.
Wise people do not call that a strong fetter which is made of iron, wood, or hemp far stronger is the care for precious stones and rings, for sons and a wife.
It is well to fetter the wings of our fancy and restrain its flights.
That fetter wise people call strong which drags down, yields, but is difficult to undo after having cut this at last, people leave the world, free from cares, and leaving desires and pleasures behind.
Those laws, being forged for universal application, are in perpetual conflict with personal interest, just as personal interest is always in contradiction with the general interest. Good for society, our laws are very bad for the individuals whereof it is composed for, if they one time protect the individual, they hinder, trouble, fetter him for three quarters of his life.
Yet still they fetter not my thought!
The wise say that it is not an iron, wooden or fiber fetter which is a strong one, but the besotted hankering after trinkets, children and wives, that, say the wise, is the strong fetter. It drags one down, and loose as it feels, it is hard to break. Breaking this fetter, people renounce the world, free from longing and abandoning sensuality.
The United States is the world's best hope, but if you fetter her in the interests and quarrels of other nations, if you tangle her in the intrigues of Europe, you will destroy her power for good and endanger her very existence.
How much pleasure they lose (and even the pleasures of heroic poesy are not unprofitable) who take away the liberty of a poet, and fetter his feet in the shackles of a historian.
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories