Quotes About Autonomy

T]he cascade of discoveries in neuroscience and genetics has created an image of individuals as automata, slaves to their genes or neurotransmitters, with no more free will than a child's windup toy.

Carried to its logical limits, a system in which no one has a choice about what action to take is unworkable.

My idea of how choice should have developed was not a privacy notion, not a doctor's right notion, but a woman's right to control her own destiny, to be able to make choices without a Big Brother state telling her what she can and cannot do.

Anything entering or exiting any orifice on your body is your choice. I don't get a say; I don't want a say. It's that simple.

kids without constantly looking over their shoulders for approval.

Mine was the first generation of latchkey kids, referring to Generation Xers whose personal identity was, in part, shaped by the independence their working parents fostered when they left us alone after school.

I don't need "support." I need . . . I need . . . It occurs to me that I have no idea how that sentence might end.

At the end of the day, feminism is not about what choice you make, it's about having the ability to make a choice.

Other couples are living separately ever after

Feel no guilt. Getting married and giving birth does not mean that you have sold your life away to perfectly healthy people who can get their own damn socks.

I forgot that the purpose of desire is to draw us forward into living, into what captivates us—not to help us attain a particular career or creative goal or get paid more or even to stay married or find lasting love. I forgot that every major transition requires rediscovering desire; without that, I faltered. I forgot that what I bother about is always my choice and that I must actually choose, instead of looking outside myself for what to do next and then pretending it was my choice.

You have to let people be who they want," Terry said. "Even if it's not what you want them to be.

Look, just because a girl agrees to something once doesn't mean she's signed, like a permanent permission slip. That isn't how it works. We're allowed to change our minds

So, Nora leaves him in the end, she said, as they walked down the stairs. What? In the play. A Doll's House . That's right. Beatrice went to the sink. She says she can't be anyone's wife or anyone's mother until she knows who she is. She walks out of their house and closes the door behind. It's this iconic moment. At least, that's what our teacher said. That's very interesting.

Because there's nothing better than autonomy. Because

It is far better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains. (Thomas H. Huxley, English biologist; known as Darwin's Bulldog

Others Act Upon Me, Therefore I Am

A continual tug-of-war develops between the wish to merge and be taken care of, on the one hand, and the fear of engulfment, on the other. For

We shall never be content until each man makes his own weather and keeps it to himself.

He could walk away from his hand-shake arrangement with Vivendi anytime he found Messier and his colleagues too intrusive, too overbearing, or at odds with his own agenda.

The moment people move off land which has directly supported them, the necessities of life are removed from individual control. The things people could formerly produce for their survival must now be paid for.

What men want is to do whatever the hell stupid thing it is that we're doing, and if you could please just leave me the hell alone and let me do it, I think we'll both be a lot happier.

Like everyone else, he is the star of his own life.

Living is an arbitrary matter and I have every right to renounce it.