Quotes About Constraint

Compulsion precedes morality, indeed morality itself is compulsion for a time, to which one submits for the avoidance of pain.

In our time the only restraint left is self-retraint.

The names of entities that have the power to constrain us change with time. Convention and authority are replaced by infirmity. But my attitude toward them has not changed. Has not changed.

Tie two birds together. They will not be able to fly, even though they now have four wings.

I]t is really the ponderous books which I envy. How easy merely to put down everything you think or imagine. No holding back, no telling oneself that this does not belong, or that. No hewing to the line. No cutting. No fear of letting the interest die. No wastebasket. How wonderful. And how dull!

restraint equals indulgence

But if unrestricted freedom can impede the individual's pursuit of what he or she values most, then it may be that some restrictions make everyone better off. And if "constraint" sometimes affords a kind of liberation while "freedom" affords a kind of enslavement, then people would be wise to seek out some measure of appropriate constraint.

If you shatter the fish bowl so that everything is possible you don't have freedom you have paralysis. Everybody needs a fishbowl.

philosopher Isaiah Berlin made an important distinction between "negative liberty" and "positive liberty." Negative liberty is "freedom from"—freedom from constraint, freedom from being told what to do by others. Positive liberty is "freedom to"—the availability of opportunities to be the author of your life and to make it meaningful and significant.

Men are moral beings in their untrammelled nature. If constraint and coercion can once be removed they will be happy and if they are happy they will also be good...

Chains (other than the ones we all learned to make out of strips of colored paper in kindergarten I suppose) are strong. We use them to pull engine blocks out of trucks and to bind the arms and legs of dangerous prisoners.

If a person did all the work of a slave but had the option of quitting at any time without being physically restrained or punished, we would not call him a slave—and this violence was often a regular part of a slave's life.

I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires.

Being of any reasonable sort appears to require limitation.

A long period of unfreedom—adherence to a singular interpretive structure—is necessary for the development of a free mind.

Now, power may accompany authority, and perhaps it must. However, and more important, genuine authority constrains the arbitrary exercise of power.

For Nietzsche and Dostoevsky alike, freedom—even the ability to act—requires constraint. For this reason, they both recognized the vital necessity of the dogma of the Church. The individual must be constrained, moulded—even brought close to destruction—by a restrictive, coherent disciplinary structure, before he or she can act freely and competently.

Un largo periodo de falta de libertad —de adhesión a una estructura interpretativa particular— es necesario para que se desarrolle una mente libre.

la auténtica autoridad constriñe el ejercicio arbitrario del poder.

Elegimos el ejemplar más exótico, nos enamoramos de su libertad y empezamos a construirle una jaula

Cómo va a entender que esas cosas, que se pueden hacer pensando en otras, no agotan como las que no pueden hacerse ni pensando constante, profunda, desgarradoramente en ellas mismas?

He could not write what he wanted, but what he had to.

Thistleclaw practically had to sit on him to stop him.

Approved attributes and their relation to face make every man his own jailer; this is a fundamental social constraint even though each man may like his cell.