Quotes About Self-reliance

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

Everything is organized. If something is broken, I fix it. If something goes wrong, it's my own fault. If I have it, I send money to the family, and they can do with it what they want, and I won't depend on them, and they won't depend on me.

To those peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required—not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right.

I listened to a Republican colleague work himself into a lather over a proposed plan to provide school breakfasts to preschoolers. Such a plan, he insisted, would crush their spirit of self-reliance. I had to point out that not too many five-year-olds I knew were self-reliant, but children who spent their formative years to hungry to learn could very well end up being charges of the state.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or time. We are the ones we've been waiting for change we seek.

But I did find refuge in books. The reading habit was my mother's doing, instilled early in my childhood—her go-to move anytime I complained of boredom, or when she couldn't afford to send me to the international school in Indonesia, or when I had to accompany her to the office because she didn't have a babysitter. Go read a book, she would say. Then come back and tell me something you learned.

They're not trying to get filthy rich. They don't expect someone else to do what they can do for themselves.

work provides independence and income but also because work provides order, structure, dignity, and opportunities for growth in people's lives.

Don't look to a husband or a child or a friend or your family to make you happy. It is not within their capacity to do so.

To acknowledge the existence of other people is also to acknowledge that they are not reliable sources of safety or comfort.

The flip side of positivity is thus a harsh insistence on personal responsibility: if your business fails or your job is eliminated, it must because you didn't try hard enough, didn't believe firmly enough in the inevitability of your success.

Birth is not only about making babies. Birth is about making mothers--strong, competent, capable mothers who trust themselves and know their inner strength.

That is surely childhood's end, when you look at a thing like a rabbit needing skinned and have to say: Nobody else is going to do this.

A woman knows she can walk away from a pot to tend something else and the pot will go on boiling; if she couldn't, this world would end at once.

Trust the road. Because nobody stays, in the long run you're on your own with your ghosts. You're the ship, they're the bottle.

The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brain and in your hands, wherever you go. 'We're like coyotes,' he said. 'Get to a good place, turn around three times in the grass, and you're home. Once you know how, you can always do that, no matter what. You won't forget.

They say you thatched your roof and now you must not run out of your house if it rains.

It hit me pretty hard, how there's no kind of sad in this world that will stop it turning. People will keep on wanting what they want, and you're on your own.

There will always be those that look down on your station in life and call it a sty, but if you get in there and wallow, that's on you.

She never wore a watch, and for this she didn't need one.

Trust the road. Because nobody stays, in the long run you're on your own with your ghosts. You're the ship and they're the bottle.

you always write about individualism vs. community, and that you see independence as stupidity and instead celebrate dependency.

from an excerpt by her daughter Camille] Living on the land that has grown my food gives me a sense of security I'm lucky to have. Feeling safe isn't so easy for people my age, who face odious threats like global warming, overpopulation, and chemical warfare in our future. But even as the world runs out of fuel and the ice caps melt, I will know the real sources of my sustenance. My college education may or may not land me a good job down the road, but my farm education will serve me.