Quotes About Self-definition

Your relationship with your husband should be an important part of your private life, but publicly you should be able to define yourself.

One of the things my parents taught me, and I'll always be grateful as a gift, is to not ever let anybody else define me; that for me to define myself . . . and I think that helped me a lot in assuming a leadership position.

Do you want to know who you are Don't ask. Act Action will delineate and define you.

Or as Swami Satchidananda once said, "We're born fine until we define ourselves, and then we use these definitions to see how we are different rather than how we are alike. So now we must refine ourselves.") Our participants were people who would not have had a lot to do with each other except for the fact that they had all volunteered for an unusual research project. At first it seemed like the only thing they had in common was that they all had heart disease.

I dont care who you are I know who I am

an obsession with self-definition can become a trap if that is all we think about, all we debate. If liberation terminology becomes an end in itself and our only end, it ceases to be a tool of liberation. Terms can be useful, even vital tools, but the house of La Raza that is waiting to be built needs many kinds.

A whore, we've established that, filthy, it goes without saying, but whatever else the hell I am, I AM NOT ENGLISH.

We wear a lot of labels in our lives, and it's so very easy to be defined by them. We have grown somehow accustomed to thinking of ourselves as a size eight or a size fourteen, as a capricorn or a taurus, as single or in love.

I'm not a journalist or a politician or an activist.

Much of how Americans have always understood their history, culture, and identity depends on positioning Europe as the 'other,' as that 'old world' against which they define themselves.

I haven't talked much about being an ovarian cancer survivor because I don't really want to define myself that way.

It only takes a few weeks in prison to become "a convict," whatever your definition of yourself was before, it only takes a few weeks in the Army to become a "soldier.

If you'd called me an ox, I'd have said I was an ox; if you'd called me a horse, I'd have said I was a horse. If the reality is there and you refuse to accept the name men give it, you'll only lay yourself open to double harassment.

Define yourself before others do.

Define yourself before someone does it for you.

Life probably does not hand us any more visceral experience of how we mistakenly define ourselves than by means of our physical body. From the day we were born, the message we received from the world was that we are our body. This was the first great lie we were given by means of the collective consciousness of humankind, which has always valued itself from the outside in.

It's okay for someone to tell me who they think I am, but it's not okay when they try to impose that idea on me.

My definition of courage is never letting anyone define you.

Maybe freedom means defining yourself any way you want to be.

Success is what you achieve when you have first defined it for yourself"

To me, you have to declare yourself a Chicano in order to be a Chicano. That makes a Chicano a Mexican-American with a defiant political attitude that centers on his or her right to self-definition. I'm a Chicano because I say I am.

It's the choices that you make and the things that you're willing to accept and not accept that define who you are.

Every woman in this world is allowed to define themselves how they want.

I try not to define myself. Other people are going to do that for you anyway.