Quotes About Captivity

I try to sleep myself, but my occupied mind is holding my tired body hostage.

What made pigs different? Why were they bred for food and held in captivity, while dogs and cats were welcomed into our homes and treated like family? Aside from physicality, we could see no difference between her and our dogs.

It's like a prison. Okay, it is a prison. There's the problem right there.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

Up till now, I thought my wife was in some camp in France, in the custody of French soldiers. To learn she is in an uncivilised country, in conditions that are probably atrocious, without money or food and with people whose language she does not even know, is unbearable. It is now no longer a matter of getting her out of a camp sooner rather than later but of saving her life.

We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom

His mind was like a cruel prison, giving his captive soul a sight of freedom, but no more

What's the reality of being inside a zoo, for the animals and for the people who love and care for those animals? There's a lot of joy, and there's a lot of loss.

I have a complicated relationship with the zoo; maybe everyone does. It's so wonderful and so sad.

It was wrong to capture wild animals and confine them in captivity for people to go and gawk at them. And that's basically how zoos got started. But once you do that, and once you have animals that have been bred in captivity, you're really stuck with them in some sense. You can't return them to the wild.

When I was 7 and went to the zoo with my second-grade class, I saw chimpanzee eyes for the first time - the eyes of an unhappy animal, all alone, locked in a bare, concrete-floored, iron-barred cage in one of the nastier, old-fashioned zoos. I remember looking at the chimp, then looking away.

'Tiger King.' They are absolutely gone with the fairies, they're all absolutely raving out of the box, the lot of them. All those people with animals like tigers, who've got their own zoos in America, and one guy's got something like 2,000 tigers in his back garden. It's absolutely mad.

I've never really been able to tolerate zoos.

We're feeding all these zoos. And that's getting bigger and bigger.

In most countries, it is possible to visit zoos and see bored animals pacing back and forth in cages, with nothing to do but wait for the next meal. Circuses are even worse places for animals. Their living conditions are deplorable, especially in travelling circuses where cages have to be small so that they can go on the road.

I am personally not against keeping animals at zoos, as they serve a huge educational purpose, but treating them well and with respect seems the least we could do, and with 'we' I mean not just zoo staff, but most certainly also the public.

When I left the zoo and I sent my chimpanzees to the sanctuary in Florida and imagined what my chimpanzees went through for 18 years, I'm ashamed of myself.

Zoos have always fascinated me. What child hasn't wondered what would happen if all the animals escaped from the zoo? Or what would happen if they got caught in an enclosure?

A robin redbreast in a cage Sets all heaven in a rage.

The sight of a cage is only frightening to the bird that has once been caught.

Hope is necessary in every condition. The miseries of poverty, sickness and captivity would, without this comfort, be insupportable.

Our knowledge of animals and their behaviour has come a long way. We can no longer justify imprisoning them, robbing them of everything that is natural and important to them and turning them into objects of ridicule for our amusement.

The kidnapped person is so tantalizingly close, kept alive by a devastating hope. Kidnapping or hostage-taking is perhaps the most disturbing form of terror because it turns this hope into a liability that can paralyze.

You've been captive for so long that you don't even realize you want freedom anymore.