Quotes About Autonomy

Bottom line is most of the world will push you as far as you let them. Barrons

I hate organizations. Folks got to be free, able to breathe, and make up their own minds about stuff, not be fed a party line. Ritual numbs the brain. Repetition is grass for sheep.

It's nobody's responsibility to save me but mine.

You can't save people from themselves. You can only try to wake them up.

Clock hands are ticking away my life at someone else's direction. It's so wrong.

I realize nobody's coming to save me. I must save myself. I must be my own super hero. Although I am open to a sidekick.

If someone doesn't like what you bring to the table in a relationship, let them eat alone.

one of the hardest things about being a mother is accepting that just because you give your kids life, that doesn't give you the right to live it for them.

Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave.

We do not choose political freedom because it promises us this or that. We choose it because it makes possible the only dignified form of human coexistence, the only form in which we can be fully responsible for ourselves. Whether we realize its possibilities depends on all kinds of things — and above all on ourselves.

The future depends on ourselves, and we do not depend on any historical necessity.

I meant just because someone came back for you is no reason to be with them; just because someone loves you is no reason to love them back.

You can have great autonomy in the things you choose to learn and pursue on your own time. When you're learning things that interest you, challenge you, and make life worth living, getting an education can be blissful and stimulating.

but whatever came, she had resolved never again to belong to another than herself.

I don't want any help, she said. I want someone to think ahead the way I have to and to do it without me having to ask.

I auditioned on my own. I tried to make a mark for myself without anybody's help, not even Mom's.

You'll have lots of questions to answer as you get older. Who you are. Who you want to be. What you think about things. Like politics. And romances. And whether you'll be able to speak out or keep your mouth shut. It's always a challenge to work out the best way to live your life, and as much as everyone tells you what to do, ultimately how you do things is up to you.

There was really no need for a woman to have a man in her life in order to be happy, Cecily assured herself. In fact, a man could be quite bothersome, especially when he refused to explain the reason for his disturbing behavior. If she ever returned to this life, she had often told herself, it would be as a man. Men, it seemed, were blithely unconcerned with the feelings of others.

I don't believe in monogamy, possessing people, the rightness or inevitability of jealousy.

What people say isn't going to stop me. I have to do things for myself.

Surely, I find myself daydreaming, there is something, some substance already in common use, that women could drink after sex or at the end of the month, that would keep them unpregnant with no one the wiser.

A man's home is his castle, but a woman's body has never been wholly her own. Historically, it's belonged to her nation, her community, her father, her family, her husband—in 1973, when Roe was decided, marital rape was legal in every state.

Unlike the vast majority of Americans, he did not assume that a woman seeking an abortion late in pregnancy was lazy or stupid or too busy having sex to have attended to matters early on. He did not assume that her body ceased to be her own because she was pregnant.

It's one thing for a rape victim to speak up, or a woman with a wanted pregnancy that has turned into a medical catastrophe. But why can't a woman just say, This wasn't the right time for me? Or two children (or one, or none) are enough? Why must the woman apologize for not having a baby just because she happened to get pregnant? It's as if we think motherhood is the default setting for a woman's life from first period to menopause