Quotes About Autonomy

Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to be controlled by good people, by people who love you.

Isn't it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in our genes that we can never get it out? Territoriality. My wife. My friend. My lover.

you don't grow up until you stop worrying about other people's purposes or lack of them and find the purposes you believe in for yourself.

Linkeree does what he likes. He likes to be alone and think his own thoughts. No one is hurt by it.» Sara said, «Jason said that we are one people. Linkeree is saying he does not want to be part of us, and if he is not part of us then we are all less than we were.» They were both very wise. It would be so much easier for Kapock if they had only agreed with each other.

Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given you by good people, by people who love you.

All the common people want is to be left alone. All the ordinary soldier wants is to collect his pay and not get killed. That's why the great forces of history can be manipulated by astonishingly small groups of determined people.

I think you don't grow up until you stop worrying about other people's purposes or lack of them and find the purposes you believe in for yourself.

Lanik : - Je suis en train de perdre Saranna. L'Homee-qui-sais-tout : - C'est très bien. Peresonne ne doit posséder quelqu'un d'autre. >>

I never really had anybody who followed me. Never wanted them. That's the thing, I guess, that set me apart from the rest of the Jeesh—I was the only one who didn't wish I were Ender.

If you can own property, how are you a slave?" asked Rigg. "Because your owner can move you to one place or another, can break up your marriage, can sell your children to some other owner, can decide how much education you'll receive, and what work you'll do, and what hours you'll keep.

A toast, Jedediah, to love on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever knows - his own.

A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.

I think it's very healthy to spend time alone. You need to know how to be alone and not be defined by another person.

Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.

If we're always guided by other people's thoughts, what's the point in having our own?

I will not bare my soul to their shallow prying eyes. My heart shall never be put under their microscope.

I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes.

Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live. It is asking other people to live as one wishes to live.

One's days were too brief to take the burden of another's errors on one's shoulders. Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it.

The Master said, "The gentleman does not serve as a vessel." (Analects 2.12)

Most of the time, you'll be able to structure your work day around your peak energy times and your family's needs, rather than your employer's policies.

Life is brief and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it.

when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.