Quotes About Restriction

My mother had to abandon the quest, but managed to extract from the restriction itself a further refinement of thought, as great poets do when the tyranny of rhyme forces them into the discovery of their finest lines.

I can't do that, Harry said. I don't have the math for it.

If on'y they didn' tell me I got to get off, why, I'd prob'y be in California right now a-eatin' grapes an a-pickin' an orange when I wanted. But them sons-a-bitches says I got to get off-an', Jesus Christ, a man can't, when he's tol' to!

there must be a saturation point and the progress may be a progression toward strangulation.

I mean, what is prison, really, except a good bar without the liquor?

Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy.

My father wouldn't get us a TV, he wouldn't allow a TV in the house.

I was brought up very conservatively. My father was positively Victorian - I wasn't even allowed to wear my hair down.

When I was 7, I wanted to be a jockey. My father told me women weren't allowed. I couldn't believe it. I was perfectly willing to fail on my own merits, but to be flunked at birth?

"But" is a fence over which few leap.

If it's your limit, you can't exceed it. If you exceed it, it's not your limit.

l tempo di cui disponiamo ogni giorno è elastico: le passioni che proviamo lo dilatano, quelle che ispiriamo lo restringono, e l'abitudine lo colma.

For centuries censorship has created best sellers because, as Michel de Montaigne said, 'To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.' (Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature)

There is nothing in the world so enticing as that which you have been told you may not have.

I listened to make sure I was meeting the minimum requirement to stay out of jail, so to speak.

I can't eat more than six hundred dollars worth of food.

What kind of person doesn't let you have gummi bears?

Once a food becomes off-limits, then it takes on this whole other personality. Forbidden is more tempting. And it becomes something evil, but food is food. Its there to nourish your body.

Ice-cream is exquisite. What a pity it isn't illegal.

If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom.

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

The ground for taking ignorance to be restrictive of freedom is that it causes people to make choices which they would not have made if they had seen what the realization of their choices involved.

Freedom is indivisible. As soon as one starts to restrict it, one enters upon a decline on which it is difficult to stop.

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.