Quotes About Self-reliance

Our nation's leaders are fallible. It is therefore time for us to be our own heroes. We can and must be the leaders that are so desperately needed.

There's some bohemian part of me where the idea of falling back on something meant I expected to fail.

If you become their property it is much clearer for you, for the club, for everything. It was a great experience to play in three different teams, different leagues, different experiences, but if I wanted to improve I had to break this cycle and make my own way. That's why I signed this contract to come to Stoke.

Instead of being on teams at school, I was preparing for auditions.

At 17, I went to Stanford University to study engineering. My time was occupied with the required reading and the extracurricular duties of managing the baseball and football teams and earning my way.

I'm not going to shed a tear for not being liked.

I basically built myself up and I'm not about to let somebody else tear me down.

It's weird; my fascination with tech was kind of combined with the fact that my parents would never pay for anything. It got me more involved because I would have to find clever ways to get things for free.

I don't have a smart phone. I didn't have one when I arrived in the U.S., and somehow life has continued. I teach at Stanford University, I launched a tech company - miraculously, it all seems to work without a phone!

I don't want a tech. I don't want to get one.

It's a little bit like my inability to read a guide book before I go anywhere. I can read it after I've been there and by the same logic I refuse to accept any technical stunts from anybody. I refused to learn more than I knew and I confess I missed a great deal.

Artists, writers and people in creative fields are entrepreneurs by necessity. Nobody gives them a paycheck or picks up their medical insurance. The ones who succeed learn to think and act like 'independent operators.' I think people who are technically 'employees' have to think this way as well. The company is not looking out for you.

With a book I am the writer and I am also the director and I'm all of the actors and I'm the special effects guy and the lighting technician: I'm all of that. So if it's good or bad, it's all up to me.

I am learning self-defense techniques.

Long-term, we must begin to build our internal strengths. It isn't just skills like computer technology. It's the old-fashioned basics of self-reliance, self-motivation, self-reinforcement, self-discipline, self-command.

I grew up in a house where nobody had to tell me to go to school every day and do my homework.

I was a very independent teenager.

A lot of the problems teenagers go through, it's better for them to go through them on their own. If you always have a crutch, you don't learn anything.

My favorite stories are about kids who refuse to give up; their homes and schools may have been destroyed; they've probably had to rely on themselves more than a lot of adults do, and they've resisted the many bad alternatives that city life offers to poor teens.

This quarantine life is not new to me. I've been like this from my teens.

I'm incredibly optimistic about what individuals can do. We have technology that our grandparents would have given their eye teeth for.

I don't have to ask anyone's permission to do anything. It's nice not have to get decisions out of three, sometimes four people, which can be like pulling teeth. So the amount of control that I have over what I'm doing is better for me as a solo artist.

I can do without a television or a telephone, I think.

Let me tell you, I am nobody's puppet.