Mental Enslavement Quotes

I see I have made my self a slave to Philosophy.

I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. If they hold thought to be dangerous - if they aver that doubt is a crime, then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men.

There shall be no slavery of the mind.

Chess holds its master in its own bonds, shackling the mind and brain so that the inner freedom of the very strongest must suffer.

Only when the mind is free has the body a chance to be free. Yes, they must believe, they must believe. Because I know what it means to be a slave. I am a slave.

A woman cannot live in the light of intellect. Society forbids it. Those conventional frivolities, which are called her 'duties', forbid it. Her 'domestic duties', high-sounding words, which, for the most part, are but bad habits (which she has not the courage to enfranchise herself from, the strength to break through), forbid it.

The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.

Adhesion to one idea is monomania; to few, slavery.

When the will is enslaved to a desire, it will in turn enslave the mind.

In this country, popery finds its appropriate ally in the institution of slavery. They are both kindred systems. One enslaves the mind, the other both mind and body.

Slavery holds few men fast; the greater number hold fast their slavery.

Meek young men grow up in colleges and believe it is their duty to accept the views which books have given, and grow up slaves.

No one is more enslaved than a slave who doesn't think they're enslaved.

When you live for others' opinions, you are dead.

One of the most tragic things about slavery was the mental enslavement, the way they made us believe that we were worth nothing; and that's what she's fighting against.

Our children lost our direction because they have been compromised. They have found freedom at the ballot box, and then they have taken on plastic chains around their minds and souls and mortgage their future on credit cards. They have to learn better - they have to learn the value of ideas and health as opposed to wealth.

We become slaves the moment we hand the keys to the definition of reality entirely over to someone else, whether it is a business, an economic theory, a political party, the White House, Newsworld or CNN.

Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It's nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith, and enable and elevate it are intellectual slaveholders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.

As soon as extreme attachment comes, a man loses himself, he is no more master of himself, he is a slave.

Anytime you turn on your own concept of God, you are no longer a free man. No one needs to put chains on your body, because the chains are on your mind.

Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.

It is yours [the state’s right] to shackle the body, and restrain our external actions; that is a restraint we understand. Announce your penalties, and we will make our election of submission or suffering. But do not seek to enslave our minds.

I think it is worse to be poor in mind than in purse, to be stunted and belittled in soul, made a coward, made a liar, made mean and slavish, accustomed to fawn and prevaricate, and "manage" by base arts a husband or a father,--I think this is worse than to be kicked with hobnailed shoes.

Few persons enjoy real liberty; we are all slaves to ideas or habits.

Tanpinar presciently feared that to embrace the western conception of progress was to be mentally enslaved by a whole new epistemology, one that compartmentalised knowledge and concealed an instrumental view of human beings as no more than things to be manipulated.