Date: 1789, 1794

"In every cry of every Man / In every Infants cry of fear / In every voice; in every ban / The mind-forg'd manacles I hear."

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

Date: December 1790

"The imperfection of all modern governments must, without waiting to repeat the trite remark, that all human institutions are unavoidably imperfect, in a great measure have arisen from this simple circumstance, that the constitution, if such an heterogeneous mass deserve that name, was settled in...

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain, / Our thoughts are linked by many a hidden chain."

— Rogers, Samuel (1763-1855)

Date: 1792

"More noble than the sycophant, whose art / Must heap with taudry flowers thy hated shrine; / I envy not the meed thou canst impart / To crown his service--while, tho' Pride combine / With Fraud to crush me--my unfetter'd heart / Still to the Mountain Nymph may offer mine."

— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)

Date: 1792

"My passions must be, ought to be, and therefore shall be, under my control; and, being conscious of the purity of my own intentions, I have never thought that the emanations of mind ought to be shackled by the dread of their being misinterpreted."

— Holcroft, Thomas (1745-1809)

Date: 1792

"Thus degraded, her reason, her misty reason! is employed rather to burnish than to snap her chains."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1793

"The genuine and wholsome state of mind is, to be unloosed from shackles, and to expand every fibre of its frame according to the independent and individual impressions of truth upon that mind."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1793

The extirpation of error "frees us from the influence of those phantoms which before misled us, shows us our true advantage as consisting in independence and integrity, and binds us by the general consent of our fellow citizens to the dictates of reason, more strongly than with fetters of iron."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1793

"We put shackles upon our minds, and dare not trust ourselves at large in the pursuit of truth."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1793, 1806

"Does Liberty with barbarous fetters bind / Her first-born hope, the freedom of the mind?"

— Robinson [Née Darby], Mary [Perdita] (1758-1800)