Date: 1791

"Your resolution to obey your father I sincerely approve; but do not accustom yourself to enchain your volatility by vows; they will sometime leave a thorn in your mind, which you will, perhaps, never be able to extract or eject."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

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: 1791

"His supposed orthodoxy here cramped the vigorous powers of his understanding. He was confined by a chain which early imagination and long habit made him think massy and strong, but which, had he ventured to try, he could at once have snapt asunder."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1792

"Love sits triumphant on the heart--his throne! / And breaks those fetters bigots would impose, / To aggravate the sense of human woes!"

— Morton, Thomas (1764-1838)

Date: 1792

"Curs'd lethargy of the soul! ... that chain'd my better judgement, cramp'd all my strength of mind--ruin'd all my prospects."

— Tytler, Alexander Fraser (1747-1813); Schiller (1759-1805)

Date: 1792

"I should be a pitiful bungler indeed, if I knew not yet how to tear a son from the heart of his father, were they link'd together with chains of iron."

— Tytler, Alexander Fraser (1747-1813); Schiller (1759-1805)

Date: 1792

"Now that stern habit throws without controul / Her chain of adamant around thy soul / May not th' unhappy Abelard disclose / (To her who pities most) his train of woes?"

— Jerningham, Edward (1727-1812)

Date: w. 1791-2

"But, sent from God, his presence leaves, / To gather home his ripen'd sheaves, / To call encumber'd souls away / From fleshly bonds to boundless day, / (As when the winged hours excite, / And summon forth the morning-light) / And each to convoy to her place / Before the Eternal Father's face."

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)