Quotes About Autonomy

There's a line in the picture where he snarls, "Nobody tells me what to do." That's exactly how I've felt all my life.

Privacy is not something that I'm merely entitled to, it's an absolute prerequisite.

Better to be with the ancestors than to live bonded to somebody else, who might be kind, who might be cruel, who might even make you master to many slaves of your own, but was still master over you.

What a day when a man tell me what to do.

I goin' call her Lilith. You can call her what they call her.

I admire that a woman can do people like a man. You just get up one day and gone. No drums, no pigeons, no note, no word, no nothing.

If men wish to control their women, they must find a way to control midwives.

No. You can't. And I can't do anything either, about my life, to change it, make it better, make me feel better about it. Like it better, make it work. But I can stop it. Shut it down, turn it off like the radio when there's nothing on I want to listen to. It's all I really have that belongs to me and I'm going to say what happens to it. And it's going to stop. And I'm going to stop it. So. Let's just have a good time.

In no case should we abandon responsibility for our own choice-making or give someone else's conception of what we are more weight than our own sense of self.

The practice of assuming authority figures know best what one needs, for example, is a mark of someone whose self-esteem is vulnerable.

the dangers of a language that implies absence of choice

The most dangerous of all behaviors may consist of doing things "because we're supposed to.

When we are in contact with our feelings and needs, we humans no longer make good slaves and underlings.

In this stage, which I refer to as emotional slavery, we believe ourselves responsible for the feelings of others. We think we must constantly strive to keep everyone happy. If they don't appear happy, we feel responsible and compelled to do something about it. This can easily lead us to see the very people who are closest to us as burdens.

This objective of getting what we want from other people—or getting them to do what we want them to do—threatens the autonomy of people, their right to choose what they want to do. And whenever people feel that they're not free to choose what they want to do, they are likely to resist, even if they see the purpose in what we are asking and would ordinarily want to do it.

we go through life grumbling about what should be at the expense of accepting what is. Within that bubble of delusion, we grant ourselves an autonomy and superiority we have not earned. We imagine how much better the world would be if we had the power to make the decisions. We don't.

Effective leaders know this intuitively. They know who on their team can be left alone and who needs more direction. Other strong leaders learn it through observation and trial and error.

We think we control our environment but in fact it controls us.

If we do not create and control our environment, our environment creates and controls us.

Every decision in the world is made by the person who has the power to make the decision. Make peace with that.

Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy.

She is tough, like a Quiner woman. She works hard and she doesn't feel sorry for herself. At the same time she won't let someone else tell her what she should do with her life.

My work is whatever I want it to be, and I report to no one regularly. The head librarian -- the man in charge of the University's entire collection -- is a figurehead, well-to-do and poorly read, with whom I have only perfunctory contact.

Since I am devoted to my own freedom, I didn't think it just to deny other people theirs; and a basic freedom must be to be bossed by your own kind, not by foreigners.