Quotes About Agency

That idea – of one's own life as something that had already been dictated – was strangely seductive, until you realised that it reduced other people to the moral status of characters and camouflaged their capacity to destroy.

The 'army camp' that coordinates the agencies of our brain is vulnerable, both in itself and from within. In effect, he who can know and master its functioning and psychology from outside can become twice its master.

It is tempting to think of this form of insomnia, the inability to fall asleep, as a disease of agency and control: the inability to relinquish high self-reflexive consciousness for the vulnerable, ignorant regions of slumber in which we know not what we do.

As an actor sometimes we sit and wait for projects to be handed to us and we don't really work. We expect our agents and managers to know who we are and to see who we are and offer us a part or send us out and submit us.

I just want to bend fire. You know, it'd be cool to throw some fire to a couple of old agents, the ex wife.

I have a brain and a uterus and I use both.

It strains credulity to suggest that an agency charged with gathering intelligence affecting the national security does not have an 'intelligence interest' in drone strikes, even if that agency does not operate the drones itself.

I was working in Camden Lock market from the age of 13 to 16, and people often suggested that I should be a model. I knew a girl working on a stall who was with Take Two model agency, so I decided to go along, and they took me on.

I've always thought MySpace sounds like a new estate agency in central London run by two men who favour large-lapel suits and goatees.

When I was 17 I sent a picture up to an agency, and within a week I was in The Sun five days in a row.

Nothing external to you has any power over you.

Those who commit acts of violence are surely responsible for them; they are not dupes or mechanisms of an impersonal social force, but agents with responsibility. On the other hand, these individuals are formed, and we would be making a mistake if we reduced their actions to purely self-generated acts of will or symptoms of individual pathology of 'evil'.

That my agency is riven with paradox does not mean it is impossible. It means only that paradox is the condition of its possibility.

But if there is no subject who decides on its gender, and if, on the contrary, gender is part of what decides the subject, how might one formulate a project that preserves gender practices as sites of critical agency? If gender is constructed through relations of power and, specifically, normative constraints that not only produce but also regulate various bodily beings, how might agency be derived from this notion of gender as the effect of productive constraint?

The political agency of YHWH comes, in Israelite tradition, to be a stable, orderly cultic presence, but without surrendering any of the force of agency known in the exodus narrative itself. Thus "glory" becomes a cover term that holds together forceful agency and abiding presence

Freedom means you are unobstructed in living your life as you choose. Anything less is a form of slavery.

Madame Merle says, "I don't pretend to know what people are meant for. . . . I only know what I can do with them.

The difference between the scarecrow and the mannequin is that they both don't know they are being used by others.

Many people find the priming results unbelievable, because they do not correspond to subjective experience. Many others find the results upsetting, because they threaten the subjective sense of agency and autonomy. If the content of a screen saver on an irrelevant computer can affect your willingness to help strangers without your being aware of it, how free are you? Anchoring

System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.

psychologists Keith Stanovich and Richard West, and will refer to two systems in the mind, System 1 and System 2. System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.

Your mind is ready and even eager to identify agents, assign them personality traits and specific intentions, and view their actions as expressing individual propensities. Here

We all choose the life we lead. – Christopher Keller

We are all agents of the same supreme power, the people