Quotes About Autonomy

but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that the educated only are free. How is this? In this manner: Is freedom anything else than the power of living as we choose? Nothing else.

There are things that are within our power, and things that fall outside our power. Within our power are our own opinions, aims, desires, dislikes—in sum, our own thoughts and actions.

Whoever then would be free, let him wish for nothing, let him decline nothing, which depends on others; else he must necessarily be a slave.

no man is free until he s a master of himself!!

The free man does what he likes in his working time and in his spare time what is required of him. The slave does what he is obliged to do in his working time and what he likes to do only when he is not at work.

The free man does what he likes in his working time and in his spare time what is required of him. The slave does what he is obliged to do in his working time and what he likes only when he is not at work.

The ideal potential convert is the individual who stands alone, who has no collective body he can blend with and lose himself in and so mask the pettiness, meaninglessness and shabbiness of his individual existence.

To some, freedom means the opportunity to do what they want to do; to most it means not to do what they do not want to do. It is perhaps true that those who can grow will feel free under any condition.

nobody who can think should ever be forced into a situation that bores them.)

To design the perfect anti-Unix, write an operating system that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do. And then adds injury to insult by getting it wrong.

if you want the most efficient production, you must give up trying to make programmers produce. Handle their subsistence, give them their heads, and forget about deadlines.

Ich sehe nicht ein, warum nicht zwei Frauen ihren Weg voll Glück und Harmonie allein gehen können. Was brauchen wir die Männer!

Uno no tiene por qué pedir disculpas si quiere ser el dueño de su propia alma... para bien o para mal. Cuando ya todo se ha dicho y hecho, es todo cuanto queda.

A person's not free if their freedom has to be given.

At thirty-nine, I learned how to change a tyre, how to shovel snow, how to stack wood. I learned how to meet a deadline without a shoulder to whine on. I became obsessed with firewood. If only there was alsways a fire in the fireplace, I knew that everything would be all right. (Prometheus must have been a women. I reverted to my ancient nature: inventing fire all day, having my liver plucked out all night.)

The greatest freedom I have now is that I no longer believe that anyone else can save my life. --Erica Jong, quoted by bell hooks in Communion The Female Search for Love

You did not have to apologize for wanting to own your own soul. Your soul belonged to you—for better or worse. When all was said and done, it was all you had.

Io ti ho dato tutta la libertà che volevi.» «Questa è una contraddizione in termini. Una persona non è mai libera se la libertà le deve essere 'data'. Chi sei tu per 'darmi' la libertà?»

Tu penses trop et pas assez parce que tu ne penses pas par toi-même.

Freedom is not a constant attribute which we either have or have not. In fact, there is no such thing as freedom except as a word and an abstract concept. There is only one reality: the act of freeing ourselves in the process of making choices. In this process the degree of our capacity to make choices varies with each act, with our practice of life.

I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me. If

Escape from Freedom attempts to show, modern man still is anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine, well fed, and well clothed, yet not a free man but an automaton.

Freedom does not mean license.

Freedom to creat and construct, to wonder and to venture. Such freedom requires that the individual be active and responsible, not a slave or a well-fed cog in the machine . . . It is not enough that men are not slaves; if social conditions further the existence of automatons, the result will not be love of life, but love of death.