Quotes About Autonomy

To be free, a man must be free from his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else.

Those who wish to deal with me, must do so on my terms or not at all. I do not make terms with incompetence.

They say that it's hard for men to agree. You'd be surprised how easy it is—when both parties hold as their moral absolute that neither exists for the sake of the other and that reason is their only means of trade.

He was the type of person who believed he alone could do the job adequately and afterward complained that no one had helped.

With her death Egypt became a Roman province. It would not recover its autonomy until the twentieth century.

A human being, appearances to the contrary, doesn't create his own purposes. These are imposed by the time he's born into; he may serve them, he may rebel against them, but the object of his service or rebellion comes from the outside. To experience complete freedom in seeking his purposes he would have to be alone, and that's impossible, since a person who isn't brought up among people cannot become a person.

It's true that even though I'm a world unto myself, I've just a speck of dust in the avalanche of events. But nothing will ever force me to think like a speck of dust!

Am I responsible for my unconscious? No one else is, if not myself.

Are you willing to die for yourself? If you want to be, you have to be able to take the very first step toward attaining that capability. You have to be willing to live for yourself.

As all these barriers to single living and personal autonomy gradually eroded, society's ability to pressure people into marrying, or keep them in a marriage against their wishes, was drastically curtailed. People no longer needed to marry in order to construct successful lives or long-lasting sexual relationships. With that, thousands of years of tradition came to an end.

Most parents would not allow more than one daughter to remain unmarried. So if one daughter had already declared herself a spinster, her sister had to conduct a marriage ceremony with a dead man, called marrying a tablet, to retain her independence. These women later told historians that "it was not so easy to find an unmarried dead man to marry," so when one did become available, they vied with one another "to be the one who would get to marry him.

European demographer Anton Kuijsten comments that rather than ordering from "the standard life course menu, as people used to do," an individual now "composes his or her history à la carte." And marriage, "the obligatory entrée" during the 1950s, "has become the optional dessert.

Stop caring what other people think. How? Understand that this is your life, not theirs, and you'll have no one to blame but yourself if things don't work out the way you'd hoped...their opinion shouldn't matter more than your own.

No one owns me, she said. No one. No matter what binds me. No matter what shackles hold me. No matter what I am compelled to do. I am the only one who holds my heart.

Solitude is good for great minds but bad for small ones. It troubles brains that it does not illuminate." Yet Hugo was unable to go as far as his older English contemporary William Wordsworth, for whom solitude was a "bliss" that filled the heart with joy. Largely avoiding its extremes of hell and bliss, here I will explore the middle ground of solitude, which I consider a site of autonomy, wonder, contemplation, imagination, inspiration, and care.

A sentient mind refuses to be confined by the parameters of its programming.

I think the idea is that every person has to live for his or her own life and then make the choice to share it with other people. Maybe that is what makes people participate.

Every person has to live his or her own life and then make the choice to share it with other people.

She said that by introducing me to all these great things, Mary Elizabeth gained a "superior position" that she wouldn't need if she was confident about herself. She also said that people who try to control situations all the time are afraid that if they don't, nothing will work out the way they want.

Podría morir por ti. Pero no voy a vivir para ti.

I think the idea is that every person has to live for his or her own life and then make the choice to share it with other people.

And then he says something like this ... I would die for you. But I won't live for you. Something like that. I think the idea is that every person has to live for his or her own life and then make the choice to share it with other people.

He realized that if he didn't leave, it would never be his life. It would be theirs.

Something like that. I think the idea is that every person has to live for his or her own life and then make the choice to share it with other people.