Edward T. Hall Quotes

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul.

I hate zoos.

I've always had a repulsion going in a place where animals are in captivity.

Confining marine animals to tanks and separating them from their families and their natural surroundings, just so people can watch them swim in endless circles, teaches us far more about humans than it does about animals - and the lesson is not a flattering one.

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.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

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

People are often unable to do anything, imprisoned as they are in I don't know what kind of terrible, terrible, oh such terrible cage.

Because I understand all the ways of trying to escape, how sometimes you escape one prison only to find you've built yourself a different one.

Who imprisoned me here? Who keeps me here? Who can release me? Who's controlling and constraining my life except...me?

I started thinking what could happen with my art and I realized that the biggest thing that could is that it winds up in a museum. It's like finding a rare animal and putting it in the zoo.

We are all living in cages with the door wide open.

Each man is his own prisoner, in solitary confinement for life.

Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren't you just in another, larger one?

Like a bird, when his cage is opened, stays on his perch, dazzled by freedom, the postponed traveler does not see that his cage, with its bars of anxiety, it is open.

Many a one cannot loosen his own fetters, but is nevertheless his friend's emancipator.

I thought that my invincible power would hold the world captive, leaving me in a freedom undisturbed. Thus night and day I worked at the chain with huge fires and cruel hard strokes. When at last the work was done and the links were complete and unbreakable, I found that it held me in its grip.

Ye have locked yerselves up in cages of fear and, behold, do ye now complain that ye lack FREEDOM!

You expect me to believe that you're being held against your will?" I raised a skeptical eyebrow. "You're roaming around the castle freely." "As are you." He turned away from me then. "Not all prisons have bars. You should know that better than anyone, Princess.

you parrot negative things and squawk about the things you don't love, you are literally jailing yourself, like a parrot in a cage. Every time you talk about what you don't love, you are adding another bar to the cage and you are locking yourself away from all the good.

The world like our heads was meant to be escaped from, they are prisons world and head alike.

My heart's in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand's in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught.

No good ever comes from putting up walls. What people mistake for safety is in fact captivity. And few things thrive in captivity.

Zoo is an artificial territory, an approximation. Civilization is our natural territory.