Quotes About Autonomy

Power is the ability not to have to please

My parents disapproved of very little that I did. They didn't approve, either: Whatever opinions they had about what I did, they kept to themselves. They believed my life was my own business. This, I understand now, is a great gift, though a gift that comes without kvelling.

Free of the demands, the judgments, and the petty tyrannies of others.

always a choice, even in not choosing.

Address only those problems that are true problems to you, and don't create or imagine problems because someone else thinks you have them, no matter if that person is family, friend, or expert.

Then, when those amateur experts share their advice, you can smile, say "Oh, really?" and then go about your business, with quiet confidence, in your own way.

No woman really wants a man to carry her off; she only wants him to want to do it.

I knew I'd claimed my own power, when I stopped asking others to approve, to endorse or to agree with me about anything.

Still, Mrs Potts wasn't going to let the girl just leave - not if she could help it. And having lived with a stubborn individual for quite some time, she knew that sometimes the best way to make people do what they didn't want to do was to give them the chance to do it on their own terms.

The thing is, that world doesn't exist. All growing up means is that your realize no one will come along to fix things. No one will come along to save you.

All growing up means is that you realize no one will come along and fix things.

I stood for a moment, watching them drive away. I thought how different they—and their lives—had become from what I had expected. And I thought: It is their life, they can do what they want, or need to do.

Siempre estamos solos. Nacemos solos. Morimos solos. ¿Qué más da?

I learned a long time ago … you can't live other people's lives. We have to make our own decisions, even if we're wrong.

national self-determination ("no right anywhere exists to hand peoples from sovereignty as if they were property")

Man has freedom to do all he wills," Spencer wrote, "provided he infringes not on the equal freedom of any other man.

In fact, in eighteenth-century English, the language of Kames's works, property meant the same as propriety: those things that are proper to me, and to me alone. To Kames and his followers, including Hume and Adam Smith, to own things is in fact to own myself. Property makes me a whole and complete human being.

Italy's cities had been left largely to govern themselves since the Dark Ages.

to own things is in fact to own myself. Property makes me a whole and complete human being.

If I have to be alone I want to be by myself.

He who does not enjoy solitude will not love freedom.

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

They tell us that Suicide is the greatest piece of Cowardice... That Suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in this world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.

Quien sólo se interesa por los libros no necesita a nadie, y eso me da miedo —