Peggy Noonan Quotes

You build a wall to keep something unwanted out … or to hold something precious in.

Some people build fences to keep people out; some people build fences to keep people in.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down.

Fences and walls can be effective and even soothing, at least for those who build them.

Something there is that does not love a wall.

I proceed, gentlemen, briefly to call your attention to the present state of insane persons within the Commonwealth, in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens—chained naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience.

For some people, life is the process of knocking through walls to get out. For others, it is the building of walls.

Houses are cellular walls; they keep our problems from bleeding into everyone else's.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling out.

O, mighty, divinely delimited wisdom of walls, boundaries! I is perhaps the most magnificent of all inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he build the first wall. Men ceased to be a wild man only when we built the Green Wall, only when, by means of that wall, we isolated our perfect machine world from the irrational, ugly world of trees, birds, and animals.

For many of us, the hospital was as much a refuge as it was a prison. Though we were cut off from the world and all the trouble we enjoyed stirring up out there, we were also cut off from the demands and expectations that had driven us crazy. What could be expected of us now that we were stowed away in a loony bin?

No good ever comes from putting up walls. What people mistake for safety is in fact captivity. And few things thrive in captivity.

A wall is the safeguard of simplicity.

Granted: I AM an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peep-hole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.

The present blitz about drugs - I think it looks very much like how we treated insane people 100 years ago -- throw them in the cage - as if that's the whole answer. And it's not the whole answer.

It was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see.

Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the fool no where but in's own house.

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.

If you want to destroy something in this life, be it an acne, a blemish or the human soul, all you need to do is to surround it with thick walls. It will dry up inside.

She’ll have no lover, for I don’t want her and she’ll see no other.

You'll never have a garden - a garden needs walls and you have no walls.

The wall around the window does not create two worlds.

Getting a room's not always enough. Sometimes you gotta close the door.

These walls are funny. First you hate 'em, then you get used to 'em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That's institutionalized.