Quotes About Independence

I will not listen to you, or anybody else. Because you know what? Everyone think they know so goddamned much about everything and no one knows fuck all about anything.

Everything I need is in my head, and no one can take that away.

There are worse things than being thirty-five, single, and female in New York. Like: Being twenty-five, singled, and female in New York. It's a rite of passage few women would want to repeat. It's about sleeping with the wrong men, wearing the wrong clothes, having the wrong roommate, saying the wrong thing, being ignored, getting fired, not being taken seriously, and generally being treated like shit. But it's necessary.

Just because someone is a girl doesn't mean she can't be tough and practical and have adventures. That's the way most girls are-until they get around guys. Then guys make them act all stupid.

If you walk into a woman's apartment and nothing's out of place, you know she's not going to want to stay in bed all day and order in Chinese food and eat it in bed. She's going to make you get up and eat toast at the kitchen table.

My share. I hate owing anyone anything. Don't you?

If I didn't define who I was and what I wanted, then someone else would.

a woman needs a man about as much as a fish needs a bicycle

there are a lot of women writers who never get married and don't have kids. I am married, but I didn't marry until I was 43. I knew when I was young that if I had to make a choice between being married and being a writer, I would have chosen to be a writer. I think it's a career where you have to put the career first. I don't have kids but - and luckily everyone isn't like this — I think if you have that passion, in a way, your career is your child.

As long as one refuses to know one's place, there's no telling what one can do in the world.

Ah'd rather be silly old fool than a lonely old woman you see.

Abbey hopped off my handlebars

Since becoming chief, he'd also been well served by an uncommon immunity to condescension.

Stranahan didn't consider himself an eccentric or a hermit, even though at age fifty-three he lived alone on an island at the edge of the Atlantic with no landline, satellite dish or personal computer.

I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves.

Arguments from authority carry little weight – authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.

I promise to question everything my leaders tell me. I promise to use my critical faculties. I promise to develop my independence of thought. I promise to educate myself so I can make my own judgements.

Ubi dubium ibi libertas: Where there is doubt, there is freedom. LATIN PROVERB

Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom. But reading is still the path.

One of the great commandments of science is, Mistrust arguments from authority. (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.) Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else. This independence of science, its occasional unwillingness to accept conventional wisdom, makes it dangerous to doctrines less self critical, or with pretensions of certitude.

Tsiolkovsky wrote: "The Earth is the cradle of mankind. But one does not live in the cradle forever.

We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free. EPICTETUS, Roman philosopher and former slave, Discourses

Los dioses no vienen a componer las cosas que nos salieron mal. Fíjese en la historia del hombre, y se dará cuenta de que siempre estuvimos solos

One of the great commandments of science is, "Mistrust arguments from authority." (