James Russell Lowell Quotes

Some rules are there for a reason - but it's one thing to have a rule that protects and another to have rules that stifle.

You can't always let people do their own thing.

Everyone around me is so strict about keeping me grounded.

What a cage is to the wild beast, law is to the selfish man.

There were a lot of stop signs in my life... People telling you what to do, when to do it, and so on.

In all my life, I have never been free. I have never been able to do anything with freedom, except in the field of my writing.

Discipline is ... life-inhibiting, is at the very least curtailment of vital activity insofar as the latter cannot develop as it wishes but is confined within specific limits and subjected to specific rules.

Having a set, popular formula does inhibit you.

There is no more independence in politics than there is in jail.

I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.

For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous. Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings - all the human actions we think of as essential to a character - had be censored by the self lest they be punished by the state.

P.C. is just too Big Brother - telling me how I should act and feel.

For some reason, my whole life has been, 'You can't do this, you can't do that.'

Especially in Britain, people want to limit you.

We don't really like rules. We think, in some way, they are an infringement of liberty.

In most languages, 'control' is the first synonym for the word 'manage.' Control is about spotting and correcting deviations from pre-defined standards; thus to control, one must first constrain.

Attempts to tame the wayward and domesticate the riotous, to make the unknowable predictable and enchain the free-roaming - all such things sound the death knell to love.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different.

A man is the prisoner of his power.

Deference has been codified in American life as political correctness. And political correctness functions like a despotic regime. It is an oppressiveness that spreads its edicts further and further into the crevices of everyday life.

We can't let censorship take over.

Nothing should be banned. I think it is just not good.

Seeking to ban things is as bossy as you can get.

California always struck me as a police state.

Dogma, Whatever Form It Takes, Is The Ultimate Enemy Of Human Freedom.