Do you think I am an automaton? ~ a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! ~ I have as much soul as you ~ and full as much heart! I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal ~ as we are!
Your god, sir, is the World. In my eyes, you, too, if not an infidel, are an idolater. I conceive that you ignorantly worship: in all things you appear to me too superstitious. Sir, your god, your great Bel, your fish~tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon. You, and such as you, have raised him to a throne, put on him a crown, given him a sceptre. Behold how hideously he governs! He stretches out the arm of Mezentius and fetters the dead to the living. In his realm there is hatred ~ secret hatred: there is disgust ~ unspoken disgust: there is treachery ~ family treachery: there is vice ~ deep, deadly, domestic vice. In his dominions, children grow unloving between parents who have never loved: infants are nursed on deception from their very birth: they are reared in an atmosphere corrupt with lies .... All that surrounds him hastens to decay: all declines and degenerates under his sceptre. Your god is a masked Death. ~ Charlotte Brontë
Cage an eagle and it will bite at the wires, be they of iron or of gold ~ Ibsen .... ..