Quotes About Independence

I prefer to regard myself as one who has the ability and the mental and nervous equipment to make his own laws and act according to them rather than accept the laws that suit the lowest common denominator of the people.

I am allergic to almost every form of international agency, conference or committee.

Painters, writers, musicians are lonely people. So are statesmen and admirals and generals. But then, I added to be fair, so are criminals and lunatics. Let's just say, not to be too flattering, that true individuals are lonely. -- Vivienne Michel

I expect because I think I can handle life better on my own. Most marriages don't add two people together. They subtract one from the other.

Bond found this irksome. He disliked being cosseted. It gave him claustrophobia.

The world is too public. These things can only be secured in privacy. You talk of kings and presidents. How much power do they possess? As much as their people will allow them. Who in the world has the power of life or death over his people? Now that Stalin is dead, can you name any man except myself? And how do I possess that power, that sovereignty? Through privacy. Through the fact that nobody knows. Through the fact that I have to account to no one.

There are no gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation.

Perhaps I'd been a slow developer, but I was well into my forties before I realized that you don't have to comply with a request just because it's reasonable or reasonably put. Age is the great dis-obliger. You can be yourself and say no.

It made no sense, she knew, arranging flowers before the water was in — but there it was; she couldn't resist moving them around, and not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when they were alone.

She lit up as she descended the stairs to the hall, knowing that she would not have dared had her father been at home. He had precise ideas about where a woman should be seen smoking: not in the street, or any public place, not on entering a room, not standing up, and only when offered, never from her own supply - notions as self evident to him as natural justice. Three years among the sophisticates of Girton had not provided her with courage to confront him.

I'm sorry to disappoint you, but my experience belongs to me, not the collective bloody unconscious.

When she found a place of her own and packed her bags he asked her to marry him. She kissed him, and quoted in his ear, He married a woman to stop her getting away, Now she's there all day.

But on this particular morning, weary of books and birdsong and country peace, Edward took his rickety childhood bike from the shed, raised the saddle, pumped up the tired and set off with no particular plan. He had a pound note and two half crowns in his pocket and all he wanted was forward movement.

He no longer cared much what others thought of him. There were few benefits in growing older, and this was one.

Se non vuoi fare il guastafeste devi unirti alla compagnia. Ma Peter non la pensava così. Non aveva niente in contrario a stare con gli altri quando era il caso. Ma la gente esagera. Anzi, secondo lui, se si fosse sprecato un po' meno tempo a stare insieme e a convincere gli altri a fare lo stesso, e se ne fosse dedicato un po'di più a stare da soli e pensare a chi siamo e chi potremmo essere, allora il mondo sarebbe stato un posto migliore, magari anche senza le guerre.

Old Europa tosses in her dreams. She wants to help but she doesn't want to share or lose what she has.

I despised even more the agglomeration of routines and learning algorithms that could burrow into my life, like a tropical river worm, and make choices on my behalf.

The money to buy even the cheapest of these things had been earned by Clive dreaming up sounds, by putting one note in front of another. He had imagined everything here, he had willed it all to be here, without anyone's help.

Her college years felt like freedom to her.

She would never be able to console herself that she was pressured or bullied. She never was. She trapped herself, she marched into the labyrinth of her own construction, and was too young, too awestruck, too keen to please, to insist on making her own way back. She was not endowed with, or old enough to possess, such independence or spirit. An imposing congregation had massed itself around her first certainties, and now it was waiting and she could not disappoint it at the altar.

He came to find her, wanting what everyone wanted, and what only free-thinking people, not the supernatural, could give. Meaning.

Given Stalin's recent backsliding on the political independence of Eastern Europe

She's come to you this time of her own accord, and crossed our threshold of her own free will. May she always be free, just as she is today.

Thank God I'm blind, since I can't see the crimes Britain is committing against my people.