Quotes About Agency

Life is the sum of your choices.

Nobody is the author or producer of his own life story ... somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense, namely, its actor and sufferer ... but nobody is the author.

We cannot lead a choiceless life. Every day, every moment, every second, there is a choice. If it were not so, we would not be individuals.

I will begin with this confession: whatever I have done in the course of my life, whether it be good or evil, has been done freely; I am a free agent.

There are real indignities and real problems when all facets of life are controlled –when to get up, to eat, to shower-and chemicals are put inside our bodies against our will.

Freedom is control in your own life.

I suddenly realized at the CIA that I had to make life-and-death decisions about people.

You decide who, how far, and how often, if ever.

To be new or original, after all, is proof that we are alive and have agency, that we are not enmeshed in an inexorable chain of cause and effect.

Art is two parts agency and one part inner heat. The artist loves going down rabbit holes, working toward and against something at the same time, translating sensory and extrasensory impressions that all have their own sovereignty or joy, each of them on a journey to bring something back from a personal underworld, to build a new body out of disparate parts and materials. In this way, art is something like an undoing of death.

We have no control over fate and history, but we can control how we conduct ourselves in this life.

Debemos disparar la flecha y reconocer que hay cosas que están fuera de nuestro control, y debemos golpear la flecha y aceptar responsabilidad por lo que sí está en nuestro control. Debemos disparar y golpear, pero lo que no debemos hacer es detenernos.

idea that you cannot control what happens to you, but you can control how you feel about it. Or, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, "Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

This isn't just 'the way things are.' This is the way you made them. This is the result of your choices, your actions. Yours.

Thanks to Progressives such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, we are now living under a system where the president is forced to step in to stop a regulatory agency from promulgating regulations that Congress refused to enact.

Lawyers for abused kids can challenge bad agency decisions because they can always bring a lawsuit. A volunteer cannot.#barahona

We can choose not to allow the choices and actions of someone else to dictate our own.

Obedience without choice is servitude. Love without choice is not love.

I mean, what is the point of being a damsel in distress if your knight goes off and just does his own thing?

I was blessed with a birth and a death, and I guess I just want some say in between.

The Body Shop Foundation is run by our staff and supports social activism and environmental activism. We don't tend to support big agencies.

Being a pop-leaning, female artist, you'd think that I'd have my record company breathing down my neck and trying to control everything I'm doing. Actually, they've just kind of let me take the wheel.

If we grab technology and adapt it and make it work for us, it will work in one way, whereas if we just leave it, it will stay in the hands of big corporations and governments, who have other agendas.

The question I'm always asking myself is: are we masters or victims? Do we make history, or does history make us? Do we shape the world, or are we just shaped by it? The question of do we have agency in our lives or whether we are just passive victims of events is, I think, a great question, and one that I have always tried to ask.