Quotes About Autonomy

I'll lead you to the river of knowledge. You can catch your own damn fish.

It is important to speak your truth, not to convince anyone else of it. Everyone must make up their own minds.

My name is Junie B. Jones. The B stands for Beatrice. Except I don't like Beatrice. I just like B and that's all.

We can control so much in our own lives … except what other people say and do. And their actions and their words affect us tremendously.

once that each of us is the author of our own lives? That we are responsible for what we are? For the deeds, both good and bad, that we do?

It might be beneficial for him occasionally to be reminded that I work for myself. That he was a stagehand, not one of the actors.

Seriously protecting yourself calls for the annihilation of ties with society, ties that most people need the way they need oxygen.

so that what is left of what we have subjugated might determine its own life.

She ran her own train. She didn't feel she had to get married, she wore her hair and makeup the way she wanted to, she furnished her home the way she wanted to, she did everything the way she wanted to.

We are free to be the authors of our own lives, but we don't know what kind of lives we want to 'write.

Freedom to choose has what might be called expressive value. Choice is what enables us to tell the world who we are and what we care about.

Apparently we always think we want choice, but when we actually get it, we may not like it. Meanwhile, the need to chose in ever more aspects of life causes us more distress than we realize.

The choice of when to be a chooser may be the most important choice we have to make.

And once people are in the position to be able to work at any time from any place, they face decisions every minute of every day about whether or not to be working.

As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize

The more we are allowed to be the masters of our fates, the more we expect ourselves to be.

Gawande reports that research has shown that patients commonly prefer to have others make their decisions for them. Though as many as 65 percent of people surveyed say that if they were to get cancer, they would want to choose their own treatment, in fact, among people who do get

How people look is yet another thing that they are now responsible for deciding for themselves.

FIRST, I THINK INCREASES IN EXPERIENCED CONTROL OVER THE YEARS have been accompanied, stride for stride, by increases in expectations about control. The more we are allowed to be the masters of our fates, the more we expect ourselves to be.

Our heightened individualism means that, not only do we expect perfection in all things, but we expect to produce this perfection ourselves.

It is choosers who create new opportunities for themselves and everyone else. But when faced with overwhelming choice, we are forced to become "pickers," which is to say, relatively passive selectors from whatever is available.

Every choice we make is a testament to our autonomy, to our sense of self-determination.

So even before your eyes are more than half open—long before you've had your first cup of coffee—you've made a dozen choices or more. But they don't count, really, as choices. You could have done otherwise, but you never gave it a thought.

the fact that some choice is good doesn't necessarily mean that more choice is better.