There is no greater crime than to stand between a man and his development; to take any law or institution and put it around him like a collar, and fasten it there, so that as he grows and enlarges, he presses against it till he suffocates and dies

Henry Ward Beecher






 

Suppressed grief suffocates, it rages within the breast, and is forced to multiply its strength

Ovid








 

Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition


Thomas Jefferson

The framers of the constitution knew human nature as well as we do. They too had lived in dangerous days; they too knew the suffocating influence of orthodoxy and standardized thought. They weighed the compulsions for restrained speech and thought against the abuses of liberty. They chose liberty


William Orville Douglas