Restrictive Society Quotes

The world was not meant to be a prison in which man awaits his execution.

You know when people start talking about freedom they have to be old. They gotta be old-fashioned and really out of touch. Freedom? Well, what's that? Who needs any of that?

Freedom is coming to mean little more than the right to ask permission.

The problem with this world is that there isn't enough liberty and freedom.

Man is born free, yet he is everywhere in chains.

The individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining.

It would be nice to really shed the corsets.

A crowded society is a restrictive society; an overcrowded society becomes an authoritarian, repressive and murderous society.

When I was in prison, I read an article - don't be shocked when I say I was in prison. You're still in prison. That's what America means: prison.

Especially in Britain, people want to limit you.

Even today, England is a very repressed, repressive country, and there's pressure to be kind of a certain way, so people do things that ultimately make them sad.

We are not free, it was not intended we should be. A book of rules is placed in our cradle, and we never get rid of it until we reach our graves. Then we are free, and only then.

Some people surrender their freedom willingly but others are forced to surrender it. Imprisonment begins with birth. Society, parents they refuse to allow you to keep the freedom you were born with. There are subtle ways to punish a person for daring to feel. You see that everyone around you has destroyed his true feeling nature. You imitate what you see.

The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state....The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard.

I do not like Moscow life. You live here not as you want to live, but as old women want you to.

The ingrained idea that, because there is no king and they despise titles, the Americans are a free people is pathetically untrue. . . . There is a perpetual interference with personal liberty over there that would not be tolerated in England for a week.

I felt trapped and fabricated in the fifties living up to other people's expectations.

When certain unmarried men, who had lost their capacity to sin, sat indoors, breathing bad air, and passed resolutions about what was right and what wrong, making rules for the guidance of the people, instead of trusting to the natural, happy instincts of the individual, they ushered in the Dark Ages. These are the gentlemen who blocked human evolution absolutely for a thousand years.

In Saudi Arabia, they always tell us we are queens. We are pistachios. You know the nut? Like something that is protected. So even if you have a very good education, restraints are put on women.

Saudi had been a very restricted place. Even on the magazines there, if there was a little leg or cleavage showing, they used to blacken it with a black mark. Me and Ishmeet, so many times, had tried to remove the black portion with our spit, but of course, it would never come out.

When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flown at it to hold it back from flight.

I speak five languages besides mine. I went to school in Egypt because girls weren't allowed to go to school in Saudi Arabia. It's very restricting, especially for girls; we're not allowed to go anywhere.

The grown-up world was a very ordered society in the early '60s, and I was coming out of it. America was even more ordered than anywhere else. I found it was a very restrictive society in thought and behavior and dress.

Society indeed conspires to keep you ball and chained.

I think that America is in danger of losing its adventurous spirit in the cause of some kind of illusion of safety, or substitute of law and order there.