Tom Stoppard Quotes

Man loves liberty, even if he does not know that he loves it. He is driven by it and flees from where it does not exist.

You might as well expect rivers to run backwards as any man born free to be contented penned up.

I'm like a caged animal sometimes. Let me yearn to breathe free.

A cage that allows someone to walk around inside of it is still a cage.

I think of the security of cages. How violence, cruelty, oppression, become a kind of home, a familiar pattern, a cage, in which we know how to operate and define ourselves.

Without guilt / What is a man? An animal, isn't he? / A wolf forgiven at his meat, / A beetle innocent in his copulation.

Some times I think this whole world Is one big prison yeard Some of us are prisoners The rest of us are guards

John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?

What do you fear, lady?' he asked. 'A cage,' she said.

The more experience and insight I obtain into human nature, the more convinced do I become that the greater portion of a man is purely animal.

Freedom within any kind of social structure - the whole issue of exactly what the human animal is - is an ongoing preoccupation of mine. And I certainly don't think I've come to the end of that exploration, and with any luck, I never will. But I'm very curious about exactly what kind of beast we are. We're so complicated.

There is no such thing as freedom on earth," he said. "Only different kinds of bondages. And comparative bondages. YOU think you are free now because you've escaped from a peculiarly unbreakable kind of bondage. But are you? You love me - THAT'S a bondage.

Liberty is a dearly bought commodity and prisons are factories where it is manufactured.

We're animals, I think we forget that. I think there is an ancient archetypal memory that still exists within us. If we deny that, what is the cost? So I do think it's what binds us as human beings.

I've been so used to thinking of what the borders are keeping out that I haven't considered that they're also penning us in.

I get out, I get out of all your boxes. I get out, you can't hold me in these chains. I'll get out. Father free me from this bondage. Knowin' my condition is the reason I must change

There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside.

Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.

I do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little larger. I wish to break all prisons.

Always we try to put the wild in a cage.

I think if you keep the box closed long enough you do kill the cat, actually.

Poetry and prison have always been neighbors.

Why do people hanker for the home? - security, safety. But in the name of security and safety, they don't make homes, they make prisons - and they are the jailed and they are the jailers, but because they have the keys in their own hands, they think they are free.

Hee is not free that drawes his chaine.

A person isn't a bird. You can't cage a person.