Quotes About Autonomy

With the disappearance of the sacred, which imposed limits to the perfection that could be attained by the profane, arises one of the most dangerous illusions of our civilization—the illusion that there are no limits to the changes that human life can undergo, that society is "in principle" an endlessly flexible thing, and that to deny this flexibility and this perfectibility is to deny man's total autonomy and thus to deny man himself.

No one gets punished for anything. We do whatever we want, and that's all we do, and nobody stops us, and nobody cares.

A Fillory without a god. It was a radical notion. But he thought about it, and it didn't seem like a terrible one. They would be on their own this time - the kings, the queens, the people, the animals, the spirits, the monsters. They'd have to decide what was right and just and fair for themselves.

was so easy to ignore people when you understood how little power they really had over you—he

The library was still giving trouble: a few books in some of the more obscure corners of the stacks retained some autonomy, dating back to an infamous early experiment with flying books, and lately they'd begun to breed. Shocked undergraduates had stumbled on books in the very act.

it was so easy to ignore people when you understood how little power they really had over you—

Quentin was perfectly capable of taking care of himself, except when he wasn't.

Like many philosophers, I reject the idea that free acts must be uncaused; freedom is not only consistent with but demands determinism. Were actions not caused by antecedent factors, including preferences, an agent himself would not know what he was about to do and could be surprised by his freedom. Free choice might go against the agent's own stable values, a nightmare caricature of autonomy.

But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself.

If everybody minded their own business, the world would go around a great deal faster than it does.

If everybody minded their own business, the world would go round a good deal faster than it does.

Each one of us, as long as life stirs in him, may play a part in extricating himself from the power system by asserting his primacy as a person in quiet acts of mental or physical withdrawal-in gestures of non-conformity, in abstentions, restrictions, inhibitions, which will liberate him from the domination of the pentagon of power.

But though the parts of language are standardized and in a sense mass-produced, they achieve the maximum of variety, individuality, and autonomy. No technology has yet approached this degree of refinement: the intricate mechanisms of the so-called Nuclear Age are extremely primitive in comparison, for they can utilize and express only a narrow segment of the human personality divorced from its total historic expression.

It may be tripe, but it's my tripe - and I do urge other authors to resist encroachments on their brain-children and trust their own judgment rather than that of some zealous meddler with a diploma in creative punctuation who is just dying to get into the act.

The urge that most people feel to have kids is the exact same as the urge that I have to not have kids. I do not want to raise a child.

I used to tell myself that I will always be myself.

I wasn't made to take orders. My grandmother used to tell me: 'Laws are for idiots.' She was right.

I never like being touched, ever. People used to say I held my breath when they were hugging me. I still do.

Information technology is a formidable enabler of freedoms. For example, it lowers barriers to freedom of expression and allows people to get a better grasp of their lives. It should not be used to reduce the freedom of people.

Control over the use of one's ideas really constitutes control over other people's lives; and it is usually used to make their lives more difficult.

Companies used to be able to function with autocratic bosses. We don't live in that world anymore.

It's more along the lines of raising a child: we train the system to a certain range of behaviors that we find most useful. But then we let it go, because we don't want to have to be babysitting it the whole time.

Honestly, the thing that I have found to be most useful over a long career, or maintaining a long career, is taking back the power at some point and self-producing.

Poetry, fiction as novels or short stories - these are autonomous as created by their authors. They should stand on their own, like pieces of furniture that should be judged as to their usefulness, elegance.