Quotes About Autonomy

Whose judgment do you think he faces, if not his own?

I don't need you to give me a life, you old fool. Or haven't you noticed that I've got my own?

If he wants me to be a Prince, I'm not sure I can prevent it. But I'll be my own sort of Prince. I will.

Sometimes it helps to remind them you're not a drone.

I…discovered I liked my own dance. So I stayed away and they requested another retreat on, which they were legally obligated to give me. And that I decided I wasn't going back at all.

Don't you wonder who you'd be without the clade? Without Judicial Recon? Without rightminding?

Thinkst so little of me, Sir Poet, that I must srve the agenda of my mother or my Queen, and I have no passions of mine own?

I don't know how you can walk around in a utility fog that could start disassembling your body anything your Governors decide they're done with you.

I'd had a taste of living for myself, and I could not go back to living entirely for others again.

She agreed with everything that was planned for her, and made her own arrangements later, for she had discovered that the easiest way through life was to set out obediently upon the appointed path and then slip away down a side turning.

Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility.

The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities for higher education, for the full development of her faculties, her forces of mind and body; for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear—is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life.

Who, I ask you, can take, dare take on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul?

What did it matter if no one cared, as long as she did herself? Relying on others was a dangerous way to live, and frequently a waste of time

I don't know why someone else's marriage has anything to do with me.

You have to have enough respect for other human beings to leave their lives alone. If you admire that life, build it for yourself. Don't just try to come in and take somebody else's life.

It's not your business to decide if a woman you love should, or should not, marry you. It's her business. Tell her all about yourself and leave the decision to her. God knows it's trouble enough having to make one's own decisions in life without having to make other people's too.

Is independence so bad for one?" asked Daphne. "Nothing worse," said Harriet. "It gives you a wonderful conceit of yourself.

Art proper, in other words, emerges when sensation can detach itself and gain an autonomy from its creator and its perceiver when something of the chaos from which it is drawn can breathe and have a life of its own

Some men define themselves by women although they appear to believe it is quite the opposite; to believe that it is she, rather than themselves, who is being filed away, tagged, named at last like a quivering cell under a microscope.

Women want to wear what they do because of what goes on in their heads. Their size and shape have practically nothing to do with it.

He would let himself in whenever he felt like it, come and go as he pleased. I remembered when this was such a big deal for me, not so long ago. I'd wanted my own space, my front door that I could lock behind me and know for sure that nobody was going to be inside there without me. I remembered telling him that I wanted that space back. I remembered asking him for the key, and him walking away from me. I remembered him simply walking away and leaving, without so much as an argument.

Aber weißt du,' fuhr sie fort, 'keine von uns steckt in ihrer Haut. So sehr uns das Wohl anderer Menschen am Herzen liegt, wir können nicht ihr Leben leben. Jeder kann nur das tun, was ihm möglich ist. Es mag mehr sein, als das, was wir, also du oder ich, tun könnten, oder auch weniger, aber meistens ist es etwas anderes.

Das schönste an einer Freundschaft ist,' sagte sie, 'zu tun, wozu man Lust hat, ohne mit dem anderen reden zu müssen.