Quotes About Independence

It's not our parents' fault. Or our schools'. Or the government's. Or our friends'. They all have their own issues—no need to blame them. But there's no need to say yes to their stories either. Now is the time for us to build our own stories.

True wealth occurs when you don't have to bow down to any gatekeepers—regardless of the money involved. Money is just a by-product. You are out of prison. You are free.

Take control of whom you report to, what you do, and what you create. Don't just do what's listed in your job description.

In other words, just do it. Leave behind everyone else's definitions or else you will drown in them. Why listen to him? He made 50,000 works of art in his life. On average two per day.

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.

The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

In my case, I think my exile saved my life, for it inexorably confirmed something which Americans appear to have great difficulty accepting. Which is, simply, this: a man is not a man until he is able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from others.

We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.

Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.

Nothing is more unbearable, once has it, than freedom.

A man is not a man until he's able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from that of others.

She marched into the street, found a liquor store and bought a bottle; and the weight of the bottle in her straw handbag somehow made everything real; as the purchase of a railroad ticket proves the imminence of a journey.

I cannot accept the proposition that the four-hundred-year travail of the American Negro should result merely in his attainment of the present level of American civilisation. I am far from convinced that being released from the African witch doctor was worthwhile if I am now - in order to support the moral contradictions and the spiritual aridity of my life - expected to become dependent on the American psychiatrist. It is a bargain I refuse.

Anyway, I have long had a very definite tendency to tune out the moment I come anywhere near either a pulpit or a soapbox.

One of the reasons. . . I think that our youth is so badly educated--and it is inconceivably badly educated--is because education demands a certain daring, a certain independence of mind. You have to teach some people to think; and in order to teach some people to think, you have to teach them to think about everything. There mustn't be something they cannot think about. If there is one thing they cannot think about, very shortly they can't think about anything.

Even the most incorrigible maverick has to be born somewhere. He may leave the group that produced him--he may be forced to--but nothing will efface his origins, the marks of which he carries with him everywhere. I think it is important to know this and even find it a matter for rejoicing, as the strongest people do, regardless of their station. On this acceptance, literally, the life of a writer depends.

I'm going to have my baby and I'm going to bring him up to be a man. And I ain't going to read to him out of no Bibles and I ain't going to take him to hear no preaching. If he don't drink nothing but moonshine all his natural days he be a better man than his Daddy.

You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.

And here I was, left with only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me.

I saw myself, sharply, as a wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored.

But if women are supposed to be led by men and there aren't any men to lead them, what happens then? What happens then?

It is very frightening to belong to somebody.

It is galling indeed to have stood so long, hat in hand, waiting for Americans to grow up enough to realize that you do not threaten them.

Men are men, and sometimes they must be left alone.