Quotes About Autonomy

What Mr. Radley did was his own business. If he wanted to come out, he would. If he wanted to stay inside his own house he had the right to stay inside free from the attentions of inquisitive children, which was a mild term for the likes of us.

Cynical, hell. I'm a healthy old man with a constitutional mistrust of paternalism and government in large doses.

If you did not want much, there was plenty. Keeping a nigger happy these days is like catering to a king. In New York you are your own person. You may reach out and embrace all of Manhattan in sweet aloneness, or you can go to hell if you want to.

She said she was going to leave this world beholden to nothing and nobody.

I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.

The strongest relationships are between two people who can live without each other but don't want to.

Anger is inevitable when our lives consist of giving in and going along; when we assume responsibility for other people's feelings and reactions; when we relinquish our primary responsibility to proceed with our own growth and ensure the quality of our own lives; when we behave as if having a relationship is more important than having a self.

So far as freedom is concerned, it is of course true that freedom is commonly understood to be a necessary condition of moral responsibility.

The doctrines of egalitarianism and of sufficiency are logically independent: considerations that support the one cannot be presumed to provide support also for the other.

Minder of my body you may be. But minder of my soul you are not. What do you say I call the shots and you go along to shoot the monsters? O.K.?

In a sense, I'm the one who ruined me: I did it myself.

When something bothered me, I didn't talk with anyone about it. I thought it over all by myself, came to a conclusion, and took action alone. Not that I really felt lonely. I thought that's just the way things are. Human beings, in the final analysis, have to survive on their own.

Life's no piece of cake, mind you, but the recipe's my own to fool with.

Why do I act like this, agreeing when I really disagree, letting people force me to do things I don't want to do?

It's the same with menus and men and just about anything else: we think we're choosing things for ourselves, but in fact we may not be choosing anything. It could be that everthing's being decided in advance and we pretend we're making choices. Free will may be an illusion. I often think that.

The fact that I'm me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.

My point is: in this whole wide world the only person you can depend on is you.

The world follows its own course. Each possesses his own thoughts, each treads his own path. So it is with your mother, and so it is with your starling. As it is with everyone. The world follows its own course.

Another person's life is that person's life. You can't take responsibility.

I never could stand being forced to do something I didn't want to do at a time I didn't want to do it. Whenever I was able to do something I liked to do, though, when I wanted to do it, and the way I wanted to do it, I'd give it everything I had.

I spent thirty-three years in another man's shadow. I went everywhere he went, I helped him with everything he did. I was in a sense a part of him. When you live like that for a long time, you gradually lose track of what it is you yourself really want out of life

Okay, let's put it this way. I would like to sleep with you. But it's alright if I don't sleep with you. What I'm saying is I'd like to be as fair as possible. I don't want to force anything on anybody, any more than I'd want anything forced on me. It's enough that I feel your presence or see your commas swirling around me.

I can't afford to take responsibilities for others' lives. It's all I can do to bear the weight of my own life and my own loneliness.

Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.