Quotes About Autonomy

I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.

I have been my own disciple and my own master. And I have been a good disciple but a bad master.

The best way forward is to give more people everywhere greater power to build their own destinies.

you have to come to terms with the fact that you've really only got yourself in life, and if you don't make yourself happy someone else isn't going to make you happy. Too many people clutch onto someone else, looking for security and acceptance.

There is no more independence in politics than there is in jail.

Things in our country run in spite of government, not by aid of it.

Never in our history was we able to blame someone else for our troubles.

You can give people a fish; you can teach them how to fish; or you can create the conditions where people would teach themselves to fish.

No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.

Some things are up to us and some are not up to us.

Epictetus therefore advises us not to seek social status, since if we make it our goal to please others, we will no longer be free to please ourselves. We will, he says, have enslaved ourselves.

Notice that the advice that we ignore what other people think of us is consistent with the Stoic advice that we not concern ourselves with things we can't control.

And why is self-discipline worth possessing? Because those who possess it have the ability to determine what they do with their life. Those who lack self-discipline will have the path they take through life determined by someone or something else, and as a result, there is a very real danger that they will mislive.

I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.

I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.

Do whatever you can to restore people's sense of having some control over their situation.

Given time to attend to their own affairs in exchange for subsisting themselves, slaves gardened, tended to barnyard animals, and hunted and fished on their own. Occasionally, they manufactured small items and sold them to their owners, neighbors, or other slaves." Money was not the issue. The correlation to examine was between work and power.

He that hath liberty ought to kepe it wel, for nothyng is better than liberty.

There are times when I have the uneasy sense that I am ceding a big part of my autonomy to the pharmaceutical industry. I wonder who I would be if I weren't taking Prozac. Maybe I would be a tortured genius....or maybe I would be just me, with periods of dank despondency.

The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men opportunity to work out happiness for themselves.

No one should part with their individuality and become that of another.

No power in society, no hardship in your condition can depress you, keep you down, in knowledge, power, virtue, influence, but by your own consent.

There is an inverse relationship between reliance on the state and self-reliance.

To dragoon man into the adoption of what we think right, is an intolerable tyranny.