Quotes About Independence

Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter--it is the only filter. If the subject is not interesting enough for me to look it up independently , for my own curiosity or purposes, and I have not done so before, then I should not be writing about it at all, period. It does not mean that libraries (physical and virtual) are not acceptable; it means that they should not be the source of any idea.

Just as in matters of seduction, people lend the most to those who need them the least.

What I learned on my own I still remember.

You don't become completely free just by avoiding to be a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master.

Most people fear being without audiovisual stimulation because they are too repetitive when they think and imagine things on their own.

What matters isn't what a person has or doesn't have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.

Freedom is always associated with risk taking, whether it leads to it or comes from it.

Adam Smith himself made the analogy of the economy as a watch or a clock that once set in motion continues on its own.

The French writer Edmond About, who visited Greece in 1832, a dozen years after its independence, reports how peasants struggled with the metric system as it was completely unnatural to them and stuck to Ottoman standards instead.

Being self-owned is a state of mind.

You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice.

Being reviewed or assessed by others matters if and only if one is subjected to the judgment of future—not just present—others. And recall that, a free person does not need to win arguments—just win.*2

Only he who is free with his time is free with his opinion.

You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else's narrative.

You have far more control over your life if you decide on your criterion by yourself.

Only the autodidacts are free. And not just in school matters—those who decommoditize, detouristify their lives.

But he left us with a good lesson: never trust the words of a man who is not free.

It took five years for Yevgenia to graduate from the "egomaniac without anything to justify it, stubborn and difficult to deal with" category to "persevering, resolute, painstaking, and fiercely independent

not accepting other people's wisdom as gospel.

The reader knows my opinion on unsolicited advice and sermons on how to behave in life.

This, perhaps, is true self-confidence: the ability to look at the world without the need to find signs that stroke one's ego.*

Nero, seu otário. Não se deixe iludir pelo dinheiro. São apenas números. Ser dono do próprio nariz é um estado de espírito".

but I am free to choose a profession where I am not a slave to external pressure.

you can decide whether to be (relatively) poor, but free of your time, or rich but as dependent as a slave.