Quotes About Agency

Humans are producers of their life circumstance not just products of them.

You either learn your way towards writing your own script in life, or you unwittingly become an actor in someone else's script.

Freedom is that instant between when someone tells you to do something and when you decide how to respond.

You feel that you cannot shape the course of events in your life. You feel trapped by circumstances or swept along by fate. Rather than an actor, you are a reactor. You feel there is little you can do to solve your problems.

Most primary alliances can survive even the most brutal honesty; silent complacency is the kiss of death. When there is no fight left, no urgency to tell the truth or hear it, not enough self-respect to act with agency nor enough respect for others to respond to theirs, that is the real problem. More relationships drift into indifference than capsize from conflict. Practicing honesty and not overfearing confrontation is the mark of healthy people and their subsequently successful partnerships.

To be at the center of the story is a powerful thing, it gives a palpable agency to your life.

have the keys to my prison in my own hand, and no remedy presents itself so soon to my heart as mine own sword.

No one can lock you back in, Libby. You choose whether you let them.

Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish? Nothing else.

Freedom, you see, is having events go in accordance with our will, never contrary to it.

Doesn't it seem to you that acting against one's will, under protest and compulsion, is tantamount to being a slave?

Some things are up to us and some are not up to us. Our opinions are up to us, and our impulses, desires, aversions—in short, whatever is our own doing. Our bodies are not up to us, nor are our possessions, our reputations, or our public offices, or, that is, whatever is not our own doing. The things that are up to us are by nature free, unhindered, and unimpeded; the things that are not up to us are weak, enslaved, hindered, not our own.

not even God has the power of coercion over us'.

Some things are within our power while others are not.

So in life our first job is this, to divide and distinguish things into two categories: externals I cannot control, but the choices I make with regard to them I do control

But the tyrant will chain …' What? Your legs. 'But he'll cut off …' What? Your head. What is he incapable, then, of chaining up or cutting off? Your power of choice.

Who is there left for me to fear, and over what has he control? Not what is in my power, because no one controls that except myself. As for what is not in my power, in that I take no interest.

Some things are up to us, and some things are not up to us.

What else is freedom but the power to live our life the way we want? 'Nothing.

distinguish between your own and not your own, the things which are in your power and not in your power

the cost incurred by the agent to commit itself not to act against the principal's interest (the bonding cost), and (3) costs associated with an outcome that does not fully serve the interests of the principal

Freedom is not a constant attribute which we either have or have not. In fact, there is no such thing as freedom except as a word and an abstract concept. There is only one reality: the act of freeing ourselves in the process of making choices. In this process the degree of our capacity to make choices varies with each act, with our practice of life.

Freedom to creat and construct, to wonder and to venture. Such freedom requires that the individual be active and responsible, not a slave or a well-fed cog in the machine . . . It is not enough that men are not slaves; if social conditions further the existence of automatons, the result will not be love of life, but love of death.

Freedom is not something we have, there is no such thing as freedom. Freedom is a quality of our personality: we are more or less free to resist pressure, more or less free to do what we want and to be ourselves. Freedom is always a question of increasing freedom one has, or decreasing it.