Quotes About Agency

In a creation populated with free agents, God doesn't always get what he wants. Augustine and the church tradition that followed him were simply mistaken when they insisted that the will of the omnipotent is always undefeated. Because God desires a creation in which love is a reality, he allows his will to be defeated to some extent.

If you walk into the front hallway of the CIA, you will see, on your left, a statue of William 'Wild Bill' Donovan. Bill Donovan was the person who created the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which was America's spy agency during World War II and then kind of morphed into what's now the CIA.

NASA is an engine of innovation and inspiration as well as the world's premier space exploration agency, and we are well served by politicians working to keep it that way, instead of turning it into a mere jobs program, or worse, cutting its budget.

Worldly influences would hinder use of our agency afforded through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. But we are agents who can act, and that affects everything in terms of how we live the gospel in our daily lives. It affects how we pray, how we study the scriptures, how we worship at church.

I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. I lived in Grand Blanc, Michigan for a year and that's when I got involved in acting and took classes there. A manager who saw me at the agency I was at in Michigan wanted me to come out to L.A.

A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer's hand.

Does Facebook behave like a tool in my hand, or a firehose designed to spew at me in accordance with other peoples' agendas? Concretely: can I write my own client to present a filtered view of the Facebook stream, or have other people do that for me?

I am sick to my stomach, just, all the time. The tools in my toolbox to address that are choosing jobs where I can be a full, complete person, where I have some agency and autonomy.

Giving employees agency over their workspace encourages them to think carefully about the conditions in which they work best, and it gives them the tools to forge that environment.

I remember my agent at ICM at the beginning of my career telling me that I wasn't pretty enough, that I was always going to be a quirky sidekick. And he was an ogre of a man. He should have been carrying a torch. If he was in a bar, he couldn't have come near me, and then he was deciding my fate.

The 2009 stimulus law got the ball rolling, allowing the agency to reduce and eliminate fees and raise loan guarantees to 90 percent of the total. I knew that we had the opportunity to use S.B.A. products to fill that gap in a rapid manner, as we ended up doing in the Recovery Act.

Our best theories of people, presented on their own terms and without reference to underlying particles and forces, leave plenty of room for human choice.

As humans, our tendency is to play victim. And unless you're watchful, it will sneak up on you and you'll start blaming outside forces—parents, spouses, bosses, the weather, the government, circumstances, "the Man," whomever—for your problems. In reality, we are not victims. We're agents. We are the creative forces of our lives, and we are free to choose. But we have to be reminded of this all the time.

Our own choices might not be as good as those that are made for us.

A sword never kills anybody it is a tool in the killer's hand.

Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est. Translated: A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer's hand.

When we acknowledge that human beings have the right to choose, we deprive ourselves of it

No one will ever breathe one breath for us. No one will ever think one thought that is ours. No one will ever stand in our bodies, experience what happens to us, feel our fears, dream our dreams, or cry our tears. We are born, live, and leave this life entirely on our own. That "self," and the divine spirit which drives it, are what we have. No one else can ever live a single moment of our lives for us. That we must do for ourselves. That is responsibility.

Women like Medea are never pawns.

The only real freedom any of us have is making our own decisions.

Tell me, is it evil to simply try to control your own life?

Women exercise agency in order to survive the power relations and oppressive circumstances in which they find themselves. The theoretical task, Miriam argues, is for radical feminist theory to 'theorize freedom in terms of women's collective political agency (power to): this task requires an understanding that freedom is not negotiating within a situation taken as inevitable, but rather, a capacity to radically transform and/or determine the situation itself'.

Moynihan's unpardonable sin was to threaten liberal power by working from the assumption that blacks could be the agents of their own fates despite all the victimization they had endured.

there also comes a time when he must stop thinking of himself as a victim by acknowledging that—existentially—his fate is always in his own hands.