Quotes About Autonomy

Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it... John Galt

I owe nothing to my brothers, nor do I gather debts from them. I ask none to live for me, nor do I live for any others. I covet no man's soul, nor is my soul theirs to covet.

I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I've always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I've always recognized it at once—and it's the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that...A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters.

Our first rule here...is that one must always see for oneself.

Don't you know....don't you know that there are things, in the best of us, which no outside hand should dare touch? Things sacred because, and only because, one can say: 'This is mine'? Don't you know that we live only for ourselves, the best of us do, those who are worthy of it? Don't you know that there is something in us which must not be touched by any state, by any collective, by any number of the millions?

A free mind and a free economy are corollaries. One can't exist without the other.

you've made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don't you know what you want?

why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself.

I do not care to be admired causelessly, emotionally, intuitively, instinctively—or blindly. I do not care for blindness in any form, I have too much to show—or for deafness, I have too much to say. I do not care to be admired by anyone's heart—only by someone's head.

What is my joy if all hands, even the unclean, can reach into it? What is my wisdom, if even the fools can dictate to me?

But I don't think of you.

I could die for you. But I couldn't and wouldn't live for you.

it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed. It is the unsacrificed self that we must respect in man above all.

I do not care to be admired by anyone's heart—only by someone's head.

To place nothing—nothing—above the verdict of my own mind.

The act of thinking is man's primary act of choice.

for people who enjoyed their own presence well enough and sought only a place where they would be left free to enjoy it.

They seemed to want her approval, without having to know whether she approved or not.

When you force a man to act against his own choice and judgment, it's his thinking that you want him to suspend. You want him to become a robot.

They kept their secret from the knowledge of others, not as a shameful guilt, but as a thing that was immaculately theirs, beyond anyone's right of debate or appraisal.

Your self is your mind; renounce it and you become a chunk of meat ready for any cannibal to swallow.

No one can tell men what they must live for. No one can take that right - because there are things in men, in the best of us, which are above all states, above all collectives!

Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence—by his own choice.

No," she said, before he could utter a word, "you can't take me home. I have a car waiting. Thank you just the same.