Quotes About Independence

Dressing somebody is easier than letting them dress themselves. It takes less time. It's less aggravation. So unless supporting people's capabilities is made a priority, the staff ends up dressing people like they're rag dolls. Gradually, that's how everything begins to go. The tasks come to matter more than the people.

The amount of freedom you have in your life is not the measure of the worth of your life.

It seems we've succumbed to a belief that, once you lose your physical independence, a life of worth and freedom is simply not possible. Nursing home staff like, and approve of, residents who are "fighters" and show "dignity and self-esteem"—until these traits interfere with the staff's priorities for them. Then they are "feisty.

I left them to themselves.

succumbed to a belief that, once you lose your physical independence, a life of worth and freedom is simply not possible.

Whatever the limits and travails we face, we want to retain the autonomy—the freedom—to be the authors of our lives. This is the very marrow of being human.

Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly inferior capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear.

our sons must become men – such men as we hope our daughters, born and unborn, will be pleased to live among. Our sons will not grow into women. Their way is more difficult than that of our daughters, for they must move away from us, without us. Hopefully ours have what they have learned from us, and a howness to forge into their own image.

Black women who define ourselves and our goals beyond the sphere of a sexual relationship can bring to any endeavor the realized focus of completed and therefore empowered individuals.

I cannot recall the words of my first poem but I remember a promise I made my pen never to leave it lying in somebody else's blood.

She taught me that women who want without needing are expensive and sometimes wasteful, but women who need without wanting are dangerous – they suck you in and pretend not to notice.

It has been said that Black men cannot be denied their personal choice of the woman who meets their need to dominate. In that case, Black women also cannot be denied our personal choices, and those choices are becoming increasingly self-assertive and female oriented.

Women are powerful and dangerous.

This jugular vein psychology is based on the fallacy that your assertion or affirmation of self is an attack upon my self—or that my defining myself will somehow prevent or retard your self-definition. The supposition that one sex needs the other's acquiescence in order to exist prevents both from moving together as self-defined persons towards a common goal.

The supposition that one sex needs the other's acquiescence in order to exist prevents both from moving together as self-defined persons toward a common goal.

I had discovered a new world called voluntary aloneness.

She saw clearly that she could both love her son fiercely and let him go. In fact, for their mutual survival, she had no choice but to let him go, to teach him that she "did not exist to do his feeling for him."5

We can sometimes work long and hard to establish one beachhead of real resistance to the deaths we are expected to live, only to have that beachhead assaulted or threatened by those canards we have been socialized to fear, or by the withdrawal of those approvals that we have been warned to seek for safety

Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly "inferior" capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear. As

We can learn to mother ourselves.

My bed was safety, but my life, too, was bound up in where she put her feet.

I think now what was most important was not what I chose to do so much as that I was conscious of being able to choose, and having chosen, was empowered from having made a decision, done a strike for myself, moved.

The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself. And the best way I can do this is to be who I am and hope that he will learn from this not how to be me, which is not possible, but how to be himself. And this means how to move to that voice from within himself, rather than to those raucous, persuasive, or threatening voices from outside, pressuring him to be what the world wants him to be. And that is hard enough.

I so despise people who keep dogs, they are cowards that havent got the curridge to bite themselfs