Quotes About Agency

Just as there's garbage that pollutes the Potomac river, there is garbage polluting our culture. We need an Environmental Protection Agency to clean it up.

We are the choices we make. And have to make. We aren't anything else.

Purdue filed papers with the FDA, asking the agency to refuse to accept generic versions of the original formulation of OxyContin—the version the company had been selling all these years—on grounds that it was unsafe. The company said that it was voluntarily withdrawing the original formulation from the market for reasons "of safety.

According to Sonnenreich, Arthur was the controlling force behind the agency: "Frohlich's firm, basically, was Arthur's." But the bond between the two ran deeper still. It wasn't just Arthur who was close with Bill Frohlich: Mortimer and Raymond Sackler also became friends and confidants of the German adman.

According to the former executive, Purdue eventually went over the agency's head, appealing to the political leadership in the Reagan administration. "They were putting pressure on the White House," the executive said. This strategy succeeded.

Freedom is not the ability to act without any constraints whatsoever. Given the constraints under which all human beings operate, freedom is the ability to choose how to respond to them.

Every man is the author of his own life.

There is nothing wrong with underlining personal agency, but there is something unfair about using personal responsibility as a basis for assigning blame while simultaneously denying those who are being blamed the opportunity to exert agency in their lives

Managing inequality almost never includes higher standards of care for those whose agency has been constrained, whether by poverty or by prison bars.

In the nineteenth century, slavery was understood to be the cornerstone of American exceptionalism. The proslavery New York Daily News mocked slavery's detractors as not understanding the foundations of American business prosperity: "If slavery was so great a sin, how comes it that through its agency this country attained the greatest amount of prosperity in the shortest space of time any nation ever attained?

I wouldn't fool with these people too much," Deaver said. "They are not toys or dolls that one can arrange their thoughts or minds as you wish, simply give them a change of costume. They are grown men and they are lethal." Jiles, Paulette. The Color of Lightning: A Novel (p. 184). HarperCollins e-books. Kindle Edition.

To alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change them into objects.

The oppressed, as objects, as "things", have no purposes except those their oppressors prescribe for them.

OW: I've worked with advertising agencies all my life. In the old days in radio, you worked for them, because they were the boss, not the network. And I have never seen more seedier, about-to-be-fired sad sacks than were responsible for those Paul Masson ads. The agency hated me because I kept trying to improve the copy. HJ: Whoever heard of Paul Masson before you

As an individual free to create the world we live in, I carry the cause for how my boss and others respond to and treat me. Once I understand this and stop trying to control them, I can get on with the business of acting on what matters.

mental agency may be more usefully seen as a developing or constructed capacity.

affects ought to be studied in their own right, and that they constitute an independent sphere of knowledge—distinct from perception, cognition, and memory. According to Tomkins, affects are primary biological motivating mechanisms and can, thus, be understood as having primacy in human agency.