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Restrictions Quotes

Browse 27 quotes about Restrictions.

Restrictions Quotes

“The AIDS pandemic forced humans to cover their genitals with condoms. The COVID-19 pandemic is forcing them to put on masks. It is as if many people weren’t already going through life putting on a million masks and changing them based on convenience and self-interest. It is as if countless humans on this planet weren’t already forced to keep their mouths shut and endure the misfortunes imposed on them by the ‘fortunate’ few. I wonder which body part we will be forced to cover next. I wonder if, in the first place, all of this is happening because our eyes were covered all along. Are we heading to a time when staying safe becomes akin to a death sentence with stay of execution?”

“But I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit. For wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also all the good attachments to that origin that we can keep or restore. Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world. The dog would remind us of the pleasures of the body with its graceful physicality, and the acuity and rapture of the senses, and the beauty of forest and ocean and rain and our own breath. There is not a dog that romps and runs but we learn from him. The other dog—the one that all its life walks leashed and obedient down the sidewalk—is what a chair is to a tree. It is a possession only, the ornament of a human life. Such dogs can remind us of nothing large or noble or mysterious or lost. They cannot make us sweeter or more kind. Only unleashed dogs can do that. They are a kind of poetry themselves when they are devoted not only to us but to the wet night, to the moon and the rabbit-smell in the grass and their own bodies leaping forward.”

“Our wings were clipped, our restrictions were made, our boundaries were tested but now we are free, aren’t we? We look above in the sky at the birds and hope to be free. But the birds make their nests in the trees high above, to protect themselves from predators. Free birds must keep looking over their shoulders the same way all of us have to”

“It’s not natural for members of a society to adopt a calm, rational stance towards a group of people who violate social restrictions to act in a contrary fashion in all matters. Society is bound to misunderstand them, ascribing perverse motives to their straightforward actions, viewing as evil whatever they regard as good. So it should be. It is one of the penalties to be paid for deliberately breaking social laws.”

“I don't want them to think that we dress like savages,' she replied, with a scorn that Pocahontas might have resented; and he was struck again by the religious reverence of even the most unworldly American women for the social advantages of dress. 'It's their armour,' he thought, 'their defence against the unknown, and their defiance of it.' And he understood for the first time the earnestness with which May, who was incapable of tying a ribbon in her hair to charm him, had gone through the solemn rite of selecting and ordering her extensive wardrobe.”

“I felt that it was unfair that my lack of a few pounds of flesh should deprive me of a chance at a good job but I had long ago emotionally rejected the world in which I lived and my reaction was: Well, this is the system by which people want the world to run whether it helps them or not. To me, my losing was only another manifestation of that queer, material way of American living that computed everything in terms of the concrete: weight, color, race, fur coats, radios, electric refrigerators, cars, money ... It seemed that I simply could not fit into a materialistic life.”

“It seems to me that this honour that has been bestowed upon you comes with very few benefits. You're not allowed to show your face or travel anywhere outside the castle grounds. You didn't even seem all that surprised when the Priestess moved to strike you. That leads me to believe it's something fairly common,' he said, his brows dark slashes above his eyes. 'You are not allowed to speak to most, and you are not to be spoken to. You're caged in your room most of the day, your freedom restricted. All the rights others have are privileges for you, rewards that seems impossible for you to earn.”

“I had no control over where I went, who I spoke to or could speak with. I was veiled, unable to even look someone in the eye if they were allowed to speak with me. I didn't get to choose what I ate, when I left my chambers, or who was allowed to even touch me. But he was the first thing I'd ever truly chosen for myself.”

“The philosophy of the province is a philosophy of a closed circle that does not allow an apostasy, without which there is no creativity. The philosophy of the province is a normative and normalizing, suprapersonal and impersonal philosophy, it shuts out all aspects of life, education, sport, nutrition, nature, love, work, language, religion and death (which is far from being the death of an individual) replacing life with rigid forms of the normative which apply to all.”

“The teens whom [danah boyd, director of the research institute Data & Society] interviewed insisted they prefer hanging out in person to messaging on smartphones, but adults have restricted their mobility so thoroughly that they have few alternatives. The Internet has become young people's core social infrastructure because we've unfairly deprived them of access to other sites for meaningful connection. If we fail to build physical places where people can enjoy one another's company, regardless of age, class, race, or ethnicity, we will all be similarly confined.”

“What we define ourselves us can sometimes bring forth the best images of ourselves--or vice versa, will create some of the worst restrictions we place on our lives.”