Date: 1748, 1754

"If we attend to that Curiosity, or prodigious Thirst of Knowledge, which is natural to the Mind in every Period of its Progress, and consider withal the endless Round of Business and Care, and the various Hardships to which the Bulk of Mankind are chained down, it is evident, that in this presen...

— Fordyce, David (bap. 1711, d. 1751)

Date: 1760

"There is a certain pleasing force that binds, / Faster than chains do slaves, two willing minds."

— Hamilton, William, of Bangour (1704-1754)

Date: January 19, 1791

"He must have a heart of adamant who could hear a set of traitors puffed up with unexpected and undeserved power, obtained by an ignoble, unmanly, and perfidious rebellion, treating their honest fellow-citizens as rebels, because they refused to bind themselves, through their conscience, against ...

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: January 19, 1791

"Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in pro...

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: January 19, 1791

"It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: 1794

"Forgetfulness, dumbness, necessity! / In chains of the mind locked up, / Like fetters of ice shrinking together."

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

Date: c. 1804-1811, 1818

"Urizen lay in darkness & solitude, in chains of the mind lock'd up."

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

Date: 1810

"Kindness can woo the Lion from his den, / A moral teaching to the sons of men; / His mighty heart in silken bonds can draw, / And bend his nature to sweet Pity's law."

— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)

Date: February, 1821

"Standard productions of this kind are links in the chain of our conscious being. They bind together the different scattered divisions of our personal identity."

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)

Date: September 22, 2015

"This is not to say that "Tender Torrent" wasn't "fun" (it seems to be out of print today, the most enduring form of censorship); but for me, its greatest entertainment value lay in returning it to its owner, aware of the lewd visions that seethed beneath her sunny exterior. And really, that perc...

— Schillinger, Liesl