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The shackles of belief, when reinforced by fear, are difficult to break free from and rarely done.
Oct 2, 2025
Elvis is the king of rock and roll, who made white kids shake their shackle.
Bring on the shackles - I'm your prisoner
I have to tell you I love living in a world without clocks. The shackles are gone. I’m a puppy unleashed in a meadow of time. -- Stargirl
Well married a person has wings, poorly married shackles.
I wished that I were the owner of every southern slave, that I might cast off the shackles from their limbs, and witness the rapture which would excite them in the first dance of their freedom.
Faced with the pain of freedom, man begs for his shackles.
The harmony of natural law reveals an Intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.
The people who seem to have a lock on power get swept out in a couple of years. So it's naïve to keep swinging at the same targets over and over. It took me a long time to realize, but most of the shackles that I flailed against were just illusory.
I get freedom out of hip-hop. I get to be a true artist without any shackles or harnesses.
Habit: A shackle for the free.
I've read stories of slave owners who were very generous. They didn't keep them in shackles, they didn't whip the slaves, they built schools and churches for them, free housing, free food, free everything. It's wrong. No matter how nice you make it look, it's wrong.
Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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.
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
It's time to believe again in the potential of private enterprise set free from the shackles of over-bearing federal government.
Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me. I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason.
Without devotion, action and knowledge are cold and dry and many even become shackles.
Do not let yourself be contaminated by others' ideas of what is best for you. Cast aside the shackles of destructive thinking.
When a woman feels the first grip of her child's dependence upon her, she has forever lost her freedom. If the child dies, a grave shackles her soul through life. If the child lives, the welfare of that child keeps perpetually between her and the sun.
When making a decision, focus on what feels "shackles off" versus "shackles on".
I spent centuries I your arms. This time our joining will be controlled by me, and you will revel in the pleasure I can bring you. Throw off the shackles of your distant goddess and come to me. Be my love, truly, in body as well as soul and I will give you the world!
The Noble Eight-Fold Path is the path of living in awareness. Mindfulness is the foundation. By practicing mindfulness, you can develop concentration, which enables you to attain understanding. Thanks to right concentration, you realize right awareness, thoughts, speech, action, livelihood and effort. The understanding which develops can liberate you from every shackle of suffering and give birth to true peace and joy.
The circumstances that endanger the safety of nations are infinite, and for this reason no constitutional shackles can wisely be imposed on the power to which the care of it is committed.
I own myself the friend to a very free system of commerce, and hold it as a truth, that commercial shackles are generally unjust, oppressive and impolitic.
If the Commission is to enquire into the conditions "to be observed," it is to be presumed that they will give the result of their enquiries; or, in other words, that they will lay down, or at least suggest, "rules" and "conditions to be (hereafter) observed" in the construction of bridges, or, in other words, embarrass and shackle the progress of improvement to-morrow by recording and registering as law the prejudices or errors of to-day. [Objecting to any interference by the State with the freedom of civil engineers in the conduct of their professional work.]
An organizer working in and for an open society is in an ideological dilemma to begin with, he does not have a fixed truth - truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing.... To the extent that he is free from the shackles of dogma, he can respond to the realities of the widely different situations.
My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit.
You may chain my hands, you may shackle my feet; you may even throw me into a dark prison; but you shall not enslave my thinking, because it is free!
Don't you long to shout to those youths who are bustling around you: Fools! Leave those worldly things that shackle the heart - and very often degrade it - leave all that and come with us in search of Love!
Habits begin as offhanded remarks, ideas and images. And then, layer upon layer, through practice, they grow from cobwebs into cables that shackle or strengthen our lives.
The same thing will happen in China that happened in Chile. Political freedom will ultimately break out of its shackles. Tiananmen Square was only the first episode. It is headed for a series of Tiananmen Squares. It cannot continue to develop privately and at the same time maintain its authoritarian character politically. It is headed for a clash. Sooner or later, one or the other will give.
The imagination is unleashed by constraints. You break out of the box by stepping into shackles.
Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless.
Forgiveness is the key that unlocks the door of resentment and the handcuffs of hatred. It is a power that breaks the chains of bitterness and the shackles of selfishness.
People can live without a giant state. We've proven that already. But a giant state cannot live without dependent people. We feed the beast that puts us in shackles of our own creation. They are dependent on us. We think of revolutions as gunfire in the streets. But a soft and creeping tyranny can be beaten with a soft and creeping revolution. Think about it. Think about all the ways the totalitarian state is dependent on your personal actions. Think about what you do every day to help feed this beast and then stop doing that!
The sea is emotion incarnate. It loves, hates, and weeps. It defies all attempts to capture it with words and rejects all shackles. No matter what you say about it, there is always that which you can't.
You know how Mexican restaurants always have "border" in the name: Border Grill, Border Cafe. You wouldn't do that to black people: Kunta's Kitchen or Shackles. They don't do it to white people. You don't see the Honkey Grill, the Cracker Barrel... oh, nevermind.
Science and reason liberate us from the shackles of superstition by offering us a framework for understanding our shared humanity. Ultimately, we all have the capacity to treasure life and enrich the world in incalculable ways.
What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. ... Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion.
Anarchism stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion and liberation of the human body from the coercion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. It stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals.
the scientist's religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.
For any exam in history, here is the answer: all human history is the struggle between systems that attempt to shackle the human personality in the name of some intangible good on the one hand and systems that enable and expand the scope of human personality in the pursuit of extremely tangible aims. The American system is the most successful in the world because it harmonizes best with the aims and longings of human personality while allowing the best protection to other personalities.
The principle of allegiance to the Constitution is basic to our freedom....when you see government invading any of these realms of freedom which we have under our Constitution, you will know that they are putting shackles on your liberty, and that tyranny is creeping upon you, ...no matter what the reason and excuse therefore may be.
Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence began in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau - and for what? It was the wantonness that stirred me.
So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.
It is great To do that thing that ends all other deeds, Which shackles accidents and bolts up change.
Serving others breaks you free from the shackles of self and self-absorption that choke out the joy of living.