John Ruskin Quotes

There is no subjugation so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom, for in that way one captures volition itself.

How strange now, looks the life he makes us lead; So free we seem, so fettered fast we are!

Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.

I don't vote. We're led to believe we're free through the exercise of ineffective freedoms.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

Pervading nationalism imposes its dominion on man today in many different forms and with an aggressiveness that spares no one. The challenge that is already with us is the temptation to accept as true freedom what in reality is only a new form of slavery.

If you think you're free, there's no escape possible.

What we want is not freedom but its appearances.

It is one of the dangerous self-deceptions of our society to pretend that mechanisms of control do not really exist, and to maintain, without qualification, that we are an economically "free" people.

Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent - the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free.

The worst form of slavery is when the slave believes he is free. This is how women under Islam feel.

There is the devil at the door. I'm nearly going under, can't help but wonder who am I working for? No one's more enslaved now then the ones who falsely feel they are free. I've come to terms with the fact that nothing is what it seems. This life is an illusion. And everything you thought you knew isn't what it seems. Only truth will set you free. This new world has begun.

Perhaps most people in the world aren’t trying to be free, Kafka. They just think they are. It’s all an illusion. If they really were set free, most people would be in a real pickle. You’d better remember that. People actually prefer not being free?

It is likely to make us think we are not caged. We cannot feel the bars unless we push against them.

The English people think they are free; they are greatly deceived; they are free only during the election of members of Parliament.

Sin creates the illusion of freedom. In the end it fools us into seeking freedom from God rather than finding freedom in God.

There's one thing about freedom ... each generation of people begins by thinking they've got it for the first time in history, and ends by being sure the generation younger than themselves have too much of it. It can't really always have been increasing at the rate people suppose, or there would be more of it by now.

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

Democracy is a con game. It’s a word invented to placate people to make them accept a given institution. All institutions sing, ‘We are free.’ The minute you hear ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, watch out… because in a truly free nation, no one has to tell you you’re free.

Only the tiniest fracton of mankind want freedom. All the rest want someone to tell them theyare free.

What are we afraid of? We're afraid of the truth. We're pretending that we live in a democracy, and we're pretending we're free. The insanity is that we live inside of the false stories that we tell each other.

And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.

As we live we all get caught and torn by various traps. Nobody escapes them. Some even live with them. The idea is to realize that a trap is a trap. If you are in one and you don't realize it, then you're finished.

There is no subjection so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom.