Mental Bondage Quotes

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

To keep a person ignorant is to place them in a cage.

There shall be no slavery of the mind.

He that cannot reason is a fool. He that will not is a bigot. He that dare not is a slave.

Intellectual slavery ... will always have as a natural result both political and social slavery.

God help us from those who believe that they are the sole possessors of truth. How we manage at times to agree willingly to become prisoners within our own minds and souls of beliefs and ideas on which we can never be flexible.

If we allow everything access to our mind, we are simply asking to be kept in a state of mental turmoil or bondage. For nothing enters the mind without having an effect for good or evil.

Some people, with a certain nostalgia, the worshippers and admirers of the colonial system, cherish and nurse its structures instead of smashing them. This is typical of a mentality in bondage to decadent values, negative values - counter-revolutionary values.

It took me a long, long time to break the chains that's inside me.

This mind is a prison. It cannot find any freedom anywhere. It must die before freedom comes to you. But we have taken the mind as us, we are identified with it. This death of mind never happens to us, it never occurs to us.

In the West, there's a myth that freedom means free expression-that to follow all desires wherever they take one is true freedom. In fact, as one serves the mind, one sees that following desires, attractions, and repulsions is not at all freedom, but is a kind of bondage. A mind filled with desires and grasping inevitably entails great suffering. Freedom is not to be gained through the ability to perform certain external actions. True freedom is an inward state of being. Once it is attained, no situation in the world can bind one or limit one's freedom.

No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.

Who dares not speak his free thoughts is a slave.

Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul.

There is no greater hell than to be a prisoner of fear.

We of the modern age are a bridge between the old human and the new one. We still have the mentality of the old human - a slave mentality, like the Children of Israel in Egypt: too controlled, full of fear.

The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when they make their tormentors suffer. In seeking the Bird's death to free himself, Louie had chained himself, once again, to his tyrant. During the war, the Bird had been unwilling to let go of Louie; after the war, Louie was unable to let go of the Bird.

How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?”

We are the prisoners of ideas.

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

It is the nature of slavery to render its victims so abject that at last, fearing to be free, they multiply their own chains. You can liberate a freeman, but you cannot liberate a slave.

The slavery of fear had made men afraid to think.

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

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

To be enslaved to oneself is the heaviest of all servitudes.-