Quotes About Agency

Sin embargo, ayudar a los desfavorecidos porque son víctimas de circunstancias que escapan a su control tiene un precio moral y cívico elevado. Da pábulo a la idea denigrante de que los perceptores de ayudas públicas tienen poco que contribuir y son incapaces de ser agentes responsables.

The assumption that being gay or black necessarily harms the self-worth of all who fit this category has a patronizing dimension, because it neglects consideration of the agency that persons exercise in respect of imposed identity.

You really can't do anything about people's lives, I said to myself, neither friendship nor compassion nor the intelligence of the situations is of any use: people manufacture the mechanism of their own misfortune, they wind it right up and the mechanism goes on turning

To maintain order in your bureaucratic life, you more or less have to stay home; go away for any length of time and you're always likely to run afoul of some agency or other.

Why did men get to leave when they didn't get what they wanted?

We create the world and ourselves;

She wasn't a person to whom things happen. She did all the happenings.

True agent or "representative" is always subject to that individual's orders, can be dismissed at any time and cannot act contrary to the interests or wishes of his principal. Clearly, the "representative" in a democracy can never fulfill such agency functions, the only ones consonant with a libertarian society.

To believe in predestination is to deprive us of our free will. No freedom, but we are all slaves to our actions.

Worst of all, the regulatory agencies may presume anyone they charge to be guilty unless he proves his innocence, and he has but limited standing and scope to appeal the agency's decision to a real court, effectively "making the commission's decisions on fact final and conclusive," the ABA objected.

The Constitution lodges all legislative power in Congress, which therefore cannot delegate its lawmaking function elsewhere. So it's forbidden for Congress to pass a law creating an independent or executive-branch agency that writes rules legally binding on citizens—for example, to set up an agency charged with making a clean environment and then to let it make rules with the force of law to accomplish that end as it sees fit.

When man is no longer his own master, custodian of his own silly vanities and childish contentments he's nothing at all—being in the first place only an agent of a very experimental stage of organic free will

Our actions are not simply links in a closed chain of causally connected physical events. We have the capacity to be first causes, starting a new chain of cause and effect.

if determinism is true, then "we are, in the final reckoning, merely playthings of fortune.

Epictetus famously opens the Encheiridion this way: "Some things in the world are up to us, while others are not. Up to us are our faculties of judgment, motivation, desire, and aversion—in short, everything that is our own doing. Not up to us are our body and property, our reputations, and our official positions—in short, everything that is not our own doing.

No one in 1993 would have argued that the EPA was a perfect agency, or that there weren't some regulations that needed to be revamped; even its supporters had said as much. But the tobacco industry didn't want to make the EPA work better and more sensibly; they wanted to bring it down.

The most precious thing every human being has in this life is the freedom to choose how to live.

God will facilitate, but He will not force.

We were never promised precision in this life... With the gift of agency to mankind, life cannot possibly present a perfectly tidy picture. The ambiguities of circumstances are partly, if not largely, the cumulative result of our varied use of our moral agency, but also of the structure of life itself.

Lansdale became the Agency's expert on guerrilla warfare and countersubversion. He also acquired something more important in government than recognized expertise: a mystique, a reputation for being able to perform miracles.

Everything I have said about DCYF has been proven to be true. The headlines have never stopped. Rhode Island has finally elected two consecutive governors who recognized and admitted the failures of DCYF. A Harvard Kennedy School of Government professor called DCYF "the most messed up agency" in America. And change is happening.

How do you measure the expense of an erosion of effort and engagement, or a waning of agency and autonomy, or a subtle deterioration of skill?

Nobody is ignorant of the fact that historical events are made up of four factors: necessity, coincidence, spontaneity, freedom. Nevertheless, it is rare to find a historiographical school that does not seek to reduce them to a single factor.

Things are as they are and nobody in particular is responsible. The idea of personal responsibility comes from the illusion of agency.