Captivity Quotes

Kill the unbelievers wherever you find them, capture and besiege them and prepare for them every kind of ambush…But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave their way free.

Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.

You, for whom freedom is dearer than life itself … do not be deceived by the snare that these arrangements are merely temporary. The slavery of a single day is too long for a free soul. Since the other Dutch are free, we too must be free.

Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil.

How can a bird that is born for joy Sit in a cage and sing?

It’s often safer to be in chains than to be free.

Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.

Forced from home, and all its pleasures, afric coast I left forlorn; to increase a stranger's treasures, o the raging billows borne. Men from England bought and sold me, paid my price in paltry gold; but, though theirs they have enroll'd me, minds are never to be sold.

I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, 'What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?' and gave the obvious answer: jailers.

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.

There is not a man among them who would not leave if they believed they could make their escape … Liberty is sweet.

Slavery was not a bad day on the job. It was not your boss yelling at you. It was not hard work for little pay. This was a full system of human subjugation.

Ka was a wheel; it was also a net from which none ever escaped.

Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.

No one who lives in error is free.

Only free men can negotiate. A prisoner cannot enter into contracts.

I think slavery is the next thing to hell. If a person would send another into bondage, he would, it appears to me, be bad enough to send him into hell if he could.

One does not expect to be comfortable in prison. As a matter of fact, one's mental suffering is so much greater than any common physical distress that the latter is almost forgotten.

By the will art thou lost, by the will art thou found, by the will art thou free, captive, and bound.

The captains of the [political] system become the captives of the system.

To help students steel themselves for captivity, SERE used a variety of 'stress and duress' techniques. The military's encyclopedic knowledge of these techniques was paid for in American blood because it was gleaned from former POWs tortured by totalitarian regimes. One technique, waterboarding, was a historically well-known torture.

I mean, they call it Stockholm Syndrome and post traumatic stress disorder. And, you know, I had no free will. I had virtually no free will until I was separated from them for about two weeks.

The PoWs went through something so horrible, you don't know who's coming back.

I was shooting a bikini promotion in Mahe in the Seychelles in 1980 when there was a military coup and I, along with a roomful of other people, ended up being kidnapped and held hostage at gunpoint in a windowless room with no ventilation for 36 hours.

I've heard 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' read, and I tell you Mrs. Stowe's pen hasn't begun to paint what slavery is as I have seen it at the far South. I've seen de real thing, and I don't want to see it on no stage or in no theater.