Constraint Quotes

“Love has the power to create an inviting space in the lives of people. But if daily routine kills dreamy or passionate thoughts, the constraint of the room may become oppressive and the emptiness unbearable. The room loses then its original fullness and turns into a place of nothingness. ( " Another empty room" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Imperfect knowledge, incomplete assessment of feedback, limited memory and recall, as well as poor problem-solving skills result in a form of rationality that attains not optimal decisions but more or less satisfactory compromises between conflicting constraints.”
― Manuel de Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History

“Sometimes the best argument is the one that we refuse to have.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“The important thing here, I believe, is that truth isn’t outside power or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth—that is, the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances that enable one to distinguish true and false statements; the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.”
― Michel Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature

“It is our courage which defines us, not our constraints”
― Gyan Nagpal

“Well then, he said. What are you doing here?
I am not sure. Liberty I suppose. I lived so long under constraints. You wonder why I grub about in the mud - it's what I remember from childhood. Barely ever wearing shoes - picking gorse for cordial, watching the ponds boiling with frogs. And then there was Michael, and he was - civilised. He would pave over every bit of woodland, have every sparrow mounted on a plinth. And he had me mounted on a plinth. My waist pinched, my hair burned into curls, the colour on my face painted out, then painted in again. And now I'm free to sink back into the earth if I like - to let myself grow over with moss and lichen. Perhaps you're appalled to think we are no higher than the animals, or at least, if we are, only one rung further up the ladder. But no, no - it has given me liberty. No other animal abides by rules - why then must we?”
― Sarah Perry

“Because we tend--often correctly--to associate unfreedom with the presence of oppressive circumstances that we can and should work to change, it makes sense that we might instinctively treat the knot of freedom and unfreedom as a source of perfidy and pain. To expose how domination disguises itself as liberation, we become compelled to pull the strands of the knot apart, aiming to extricate the emancipatory from the oppressive.”
― Maggie Nelson, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint

“What appears to be black on white to whites may appear to be all white to black.”
― Russell Ackoff

“It is not a large world. Relatively even to this world of ours, which has its limits too (as your Highness shall find when you have made the tour of it and are come to the brink of the void beyond), it is a very little speck. There is much good in it; there are many good and true people in it; it has its appointed place. But the evil of it is that it is a world wrapped up in too much jeweller’s cotton and fine wool, and cannot hear the rushing of the larger worlds, and cannot see them as they circle round the sun. It is a deadened world, and its growth is sometimes unhealthy for want of air.”
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House

“The important thing here, I believe, is that truth isn’t outside power or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn’t the
reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the
privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves.
Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of
multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of
power. Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth—that is, the types of discourse it accepts and
makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances that enable one to distinguish true and false statements; the means by
which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who
are charged with saying what counts as true.”
― Foucault, Michel

“Unfrei ist der Mensch, der nicken muss,
obwohl er innerlich den Kopf schüttelt.”
― Erhard Schümmelfeder

“The majority of people live their lives under two complementary conditions simultaneously: confined to prisons they don't know they exist and confined to prisons they think they exist.”
― Giannis Delimitsos