Strait Jacket Quotes

What's a mediator you ask? Oh, a person who acts as a liason between the living and the dead. Hey, wait a minute...what're you doing with that strait jacket?-Suze Simon's imagination

For, like almost everyone else in our country, I started out with my share of optimism. I believed in hard work and progress and action, but now, after first being 'for' society and then 'against' it, I assign myself no rank or any limit, and such an attitude is very much against the trend of the times. But my world has become one of infinite possibilities. What a phrase - still it's a good phrase and a good view of life, and a man shouldn't accept any other; that much I've learned underground. Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its definition is possibility.

Come out of the fog, young man. And remember you don't have to be a complete fool in order to succeed. Play the game, but don't believe in it--that much you owe yourself. Even if it lands you in a strait jacket or a padded cell. Play the game, but play it your own way--part of the time at least. Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate--I wish I had time to tell you only a fragment.

No money in our jackets and our jeans are torn, Your hands are cold but your lips are warm.

Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its definition is possibility.

Love transcends all barriers. Age, Gender, Caste et al are the diktats of society to thwart love, promote strait jacketed family life . . ." "If love could transcend all barriers why not that of gender as well?

For eight years I was an inmate in a state asylum for the insane. During those years I passed through such unbearable terror that I deteriorated into a wild, frightened creature intent only on survival. And I survived. I was raped by orderlies, gnawed on by rats and poisoned by tainted food. I was chained in padded cells, strapped into strait-jackets and half-drowned in ice baths. And I survived. The asylum itself was a steel trap, and I was not released from its jaws alive and victorious. I crawled out mutilated, whimpering and terribly alone. But I did survive.

Come out of the fog, young man. And remember you don’t have to be a complete fool in order to succeed. Play the game, but don’t believe in it—that much you owe yourself. Even if it lands you in a strait jacket or a padded cell. Play the game, but play it your own way—part of the time at least. Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate—I wish I had time to tell you only a fragment.

His life was absurd. He went all over the world accepting all kinds of bondage and escaping. He was roped to a chair. He escaped. He was chained to a ladder. He escaped. He was handcuffed, his legs were put in irons, he was tied up in a strait jacket and put in a locked cabinet. He escaped. He escaped from bank vaults, nailed-up barrels, sewn mailbags; he escaped from a zinc-lined Knabe piano case, a giant football, a galvanized iron boiler, a rolltop desk, a sausage skin. His escapes were mystifying because he never damaged or appeared to unlock what he escaped from. The screen was pulled away and there he stood disheveled but triumphant beside the inviolate container that was supposed to have contained him. He waved to the crowd. He escaped from a sealed milk can filled with water. He escaped from a Siberian exile van. From a Chinese torture crucifix. From a Hamburg penitentiary. From an English prison ship. From a Boston jail. He was chained to automobile tires, water wheels, cannon, and he escaped. He dove manacled from a bridge into the Mississippi, the Seine, the Mersey, and came up waving. He hung upside down and strait-jacketed from cranes, biplanes and the tops of buildings. He was dropped into the ocean padlocked in a diving suit fully weighted and not connected to an air supply, and he escaped. He was buried alive in a grave and could not escape, and had to be rescued. Hurriedly, they dug him out. The earth is too heavy, he said gasping. His nails bled. Soil fell from his eyes. He was drained of color and couldn't stand. His assistant threw up. Houdini wheezed and sputtered. He coughed blood. They cleaned him off and took him back to the hotel. Today, nearly fifty years since his death, the audience for escapes is even larger.

She tightened her seat belt yet again, so she felt like she was wearing a strait jacket—appropriate dress for someone as crazy as she had to have been to come along on this trip.

It is much more difficult to see how it will ever be possible to abandon a system of provision for the aged under which each generation, by paying for the needs of the preceding one, acquires a similar claim to support by the next. It would almost seem as if such a system, once introduced, would have to be continued in perpetuity or allowed to collapse entirely. The introduction of such a system therefore puts a strait jacket on evolution and places on society a steadily growing burden from which it will in all probability again and again attempt to extricate itself by inflation.

If you'd have told me two weeks ago that one day I'd be part of a not-so-merry band of Necros seeking to exterminate a couple of other magic-born gangs, I'd have given you directions to the strait-jacket factory.

When I see your picture in its frame, A strait jacket, pity rises in me, And stronger than pity, revulsion. It is as if you had never been. Nobody in the world can know your love, You are strapped to the nothingness of ages, Nobody can will you into life, It is as if you had never been. I cannot break your anonymity, The absolute has imprisoned you, Most sentient, most prescient, most near. It is as if you had never been.

Just now it's the fashion to be hideous; to make your head look like a scrubbing brush, wear a strait-jacket, orange gloves, and clumping, square-toed boots. If it was cheap ugliness, I'd say nothing; but it costs as much as the other, and I don't get any satisfaction out of it.

The pressures and penalties of existence in the modern capitalist system are intense; and they are penalties not for what is consciously chosen, but for ways of life which are forced like strait-jackets on people. At its superficial level, there is a common feeling of being conned by mass communications, extorted by commerce, lied to by politicians and treated like dirt by bureaucrats.

The deaths of writers aren’t special deaths; they just happen to be described deaths. I think of Flaubert lying on his sofa, struck down – who can tell at this distance? – by epilepsy, apoplexy or syphilis, or perhaps some malign axis of the three. Yet Zola called it une belle mort – to be crushed like an insect beneath a giant finger. I think of Bouilhet in his final delirium, feverishly composing a new play in his head and declaring that it must be read to Gustave. I think of the slow decline of Jules de Goncourt: first stumbling over his consonants, the c’s turning to t’s in his mouth; then being unable to remember the titles of his own books; then the haggard mask of imbecility (his brother’s phrase) slipping over his face; then the deathbed visions and panics, and all night long the rasping breaths that sounded (his brother’s words again) like a saw cutting through wet wood. I think of Maupassant slowly disintegrating from the same disease, transported in a strait-jacket to the Passy sanatorium of Dr Blanche, who kept the Paris salons entertained with news of his celebrated client; Baudelaire dying just as inexorably, deprived of speech, arguing with Nadar about the existence of God by pointing mutely at the sunset; Rimbaud, his right leg amputated, slowly losing all feeling in the limbs that remained, and repudiating, amputating his own genius –‘Merde pour la poésie’; Daudet ‘vaulting from forty-five to sixty-five’, his joints collapsing, able to become bright and witty for an evening by giving himself five morphine injections in a row, tempted by suicide –But one doesn’t have the right.

Now, when I read back through my journals of those rocky times, I wonder why my family didn’t just put me in a strait- jacket and check me into someplace called Sunnydale or Happy Hills. Somewhere in a galaxy far, far away. What’s especially peculiar to me as I think back on this time in my life is the fact that I never stopped to realize my depression and frustration might stem from a spiritual problem. I’ve told you before I’ve been a Christian almost my entire life. I’d studied the Bible and attended church and all those other things good Christians do. But none of it seemed to matter anymore.

With their capacity for aggression strait-jacketed within a too-narrow morality, those who are only or merely compassionate and self-sacrificing (and naïve and exploitable) cannot call forth the genuinely righteous and appropriately self-protective anger necessary to defend themselves.

Those who should be in strait jackets dictate to the rest. Deena Padayachee ©️

Breaking Everest by Stewart Stafford On this Everest of déjà vu, We broke up in avalanches, Rote tumbling and tedium, Dead stares at the bottom. Climbers phoning in motion, A poke for the All-Seeing Eye, Pack mules heaving baggage, Tense on the musical ski lifts. Even with three tiny travellers, That peak hosted no summits, Cast-off hairshirt strait-jackets, The wound-licking began afresh. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.

rolled my eyes, shook my head and whispered, “Jesus, be a strait jacket.

Pulling a Houdini Relationships are magic; we're always getting each other out of handcuffs and strait-jackets while locked in a steamer trunk underwater.

A society that seeks to be perfect should make the strait-jacket fashionable or else obligatory. For man moves only to do evil.

Hannah Arendt, the best and most philosophically inclined of the commentators, is also, in regard to her ultimate conclusions, the worst, i.e., the most perversely wrong-headed. In a final warning, she singles out for special attack the attitude which she regards as a major source of the Nazis’ evil and of their success: an unswerving commitment to logic. The Nazis, she says, and the masses attracted to them, were “too consistent” in pursuing the implications of a basic premise (which she identifies as racism); they gave up the freedom of thought for “the strait jacket of logic” or “the tyranny of logicality”; they did not admit that complete consistency “exists nowhere in the realm of reality,” which is pervaded instead by “fortuitousness.

Strait-jacket and chain-gang procedures had to be done away with if there was to a chance for growth of individuals in the intellectual springs of freedom without which there is no assurance of genuine and continued normal growth.

Find yourself someone else to harass.” “Too bad. I choose you.” His eyes flashed for a moment, pain lighting them before the hardness returned. “Choose someone else.” “Or you’ll what? Go big bad wolf on me?” “I don’t know what crazy pill you took today, but perhaps you should have worn a strait jacket instead of that blouse.

...how crazy things have to get before I ended up drooling all over a strait jacket with my name on it at Happyville Manor.

Randolph, having provoked the challenge, could not decline it. As much as he hated Clay’s politics he had a sneaking admiration for him personally—Black George, after all, was a good-natured knave—and had been heard to say, “I prefer to be killed by Clay to any other death.”33 The two men met, with their seconds, on the Virginia side of the Potomac on April 8. Neither was experienced with dueling pistols. Both missed on the first exchange of shots at ten paces. This was enough to satisfy the code duello, but it did not satisfy Clay. He insisted on another round, and Randolph consented. Clay then put his bullet through the long, voluminous white coat Randolph wore for the occasion. Uninjured, and drained of any desire to injure Clay, he fired into the air, dropped his pistol, came forward, extended his hand and said, “You owe me a coat, Mr. Clay.” Taking his hand, Clay replied, “I am glad the debt is no greater.” (Rebecca Gratz, one of Clay’s friends, remarked, “It would be well if he gave him [Randolph] a strait jacket. “)34 In the sensation produced by the duel no one blamed Clay but many, including some of his best friends, felt he should have consulted his discretion rather than his courage and found some other way of dealing with Randolph. Clay’s sense of honor was never in question; the duel, while unnecessary to prove that, dramatized the very traits of anger and unruliness that he most needed to erase from the public image. It did not quiet Randolph. He liked Clay too much to kill him, yet continued his shrill attack; and when he died seven years later left instructions that he be buried facing west—not east as customary—so as to keep an eye on Henry Clay.35

It is always easy when you have made a guess, and done two or three little calculations to make sure that it is not obviously wrong, to know that it is right. When you get it right, it is obvious that it is right – at least if you have any experience – because usually what happens is that more comes out than goes in. Your guess is, in fact, that something is very simple. If you cannot see immediately that it is wrong, and it is simpler than it was before, then it is right. The inexperienced, and crackpots, and people like that, make guesses that are simple, but you can immediately see that they are wrong, so that does not count. Others, the inexperienced students, make guesses that are very complicated, and it sort of looks as if it is all right, but I know it is not true because the truth always turns out to be simpler than you thought. What we need is imagination, but imagination in a terrible strait-jacket. We have to find a new view of the world that has to agree with everything that is known, but disagree in its predictions somewhere, otherwise it is not interesting. And in that disagreement it must agree with nature. If you can find any other view of the world which agrees over the entire range where things have already been observed, but disagrees somewhere else, you have made a great discovery. It is very nearly impossible, but not quite, to find any theory which agrees with experiments over the entire range in which all theories have been checked, and yet gives different consequences in some other range, even a theory whose different consequences do not turn out to agree with nature. A new idea is extremely difficult to think of. It takes a fantastic imagination.

sprang on your nerves with all the abruptness of a normal night’s dream turning to nightmare. Dog into wolf, light into twilight, emptiness into waiting presence, here were your underage Marine barfing in the street, barmaid with a ship’s propeller tattooed on each buttock, one potential berserk studying the best technique for jumping through a plate glass window (when to scream Geronimo? before or after the glass breaks?), a drunken deck ape crying back in the alley because last time the SP’s caught him like this they put him in a strait jacket.

Do you expect him to say to you, ‘So-and-so is a robot because he hardly ever eats with people, and I have never seen him fall asleep in the middle of a case; and once when I peeped into his window in the middle of the night, there he was, sitting up with a book; and I looked in his frigidaire and there was no food in it.’ “If he told you that, you would send for a strait-jacket. But if he tells you, ‘He never sleeps; he never eats,’ then the shock of the statement blinds you to the fact that such statements are impossible to prove. You play into his hands by contributing to the to-do.

All we’ve got to do now is to trace the development of language in the same way and then we’ve really and truly progressed from the insect-eater to man.” “Let’s see. When does an animal emit a sound? In pain or in surprise; in anger, or on recognizing danger.” “Take the recognition of danger: the springbok whistles; the baboon roars. Each recognition produces a feeling based on experience. The tone will differ according to whether the object recognized by the baboon is a snake or a leopard. Recognition is based on recollection. Where an animal relies on its eyes recollection consists primarily of pictures. Animals which live together in herds experience the same things together; isn’t it therefore possible that the same sound produces the same picture in the recollection of all of them? And oughtn’t we to look for the beginning of word formation there?” “So long as the shock of the experience produces the sound, as in the case of the baboons, we can’t talk of word or language. But with growing intelligence and the capacity to learn, children increasingly imitate—in play—the behavior of the adults and also the sounds they make. In play the sounds are separated from the experience which produced them, and by association they call up the appropriate picture or pictures in the mind. Thus pictures can be conjured up again and again merely by the repetition of the appropriate sounds. In short, children can play with danger—without danger. In this way and because of the long duration of childhood, speech can develop from children’s games.” “Deliberately reproduced pictures in the mind represent the beginning of thought. Thus thought and speaking are twins; they develop hand in hand. As soon as a certain store of words has been collected pictures can be conjured up and linked together at will. What the thinker has not yet experienced in reality he can now experience in thought and at the same time he can foresee future experiences. Life no longer consists merely of past and present as it does with animals; it has a future too. Thus with speaking and thinking man creates a new dimension for himself. It’s astonishing what life can produce with an unburdened childhood at its disposal. “Yes, it’s quite true: without a protected childhood in which there’s time for play, mankind would probably never have risen above an animal existence. And perhaps in the future the playing of children will be recognized as more important than technical developments, wars and revolutions. Woe betide the people which forces its children and their games into the strait-jacket of adult politics!

she was medevaced to Hillside Hospital in Long Island. “When I arrived at Hillside they were absolutely horrified. They had never seen anything like it,” she says. “I had open sores all over my body from the beatings. Bruising everywhere. I have a scar on my right buttock that never went away. I had to be taught how to speak and feed myself in a strait jacket for three months until I was well enough or sane enough to leave Hillside.

These are the square pegs that would not fit into round holes. They went backward when everyone went forward, and they went forward when everyone stood still. They said nay when others said aye, and they saw black when others saw white. Despite suffering, economic and spiritual, they refused to be garmented to the strait jacket of conformity. This, and no other, is their achievement - and it is enough. For when our society no longer has a single square peg, when it no longer has a recalcitrant individual out of step, when it no longer has a voice that will rise to dissent and disagree and persists in an unorthodoxy, then, and only then, will man have lost his battle and his last chance.

Love transcends all barriers. Age, Gender, Caste et al are the diktats of society to thwart love, promote strait jacketed family life . . .