Selected autonomy quotes

1. No human being, even the most passionately loved and passionately loving, is ever in our possession.

2. I always like to know what I'm doing, but there are times when nobody will tell me.

3. There is a world which I alone rule, but it ends at my fingertips.

4. You have a right to enjoy life, but only on your own time.

5. I don't care! I don't have to show anybody my games just because they're a big shot!

6. Every man has his dignity. I'm willing to forget mine, but at my own discretion and not when someone else tells me to.

7. My life is about my journey, and your life is about your journey. You are completely unqualified to draw my map, and I am completely unqualified to draw yours. I hope you'll let me know all about the path you've found, so that I may judge it for myself against my own path, and have the freedom to choose between the two. But please don't try and drag me from my path on to yours, and I will be sure to return the favor.

8. Freedom begins between the ears.

9. I can die when I wish to: that is my elixir of life.

10. In the absence of orders, go find something and kill it.

11. Though the Negroes are fed, clothed, and housed, and though the Irish peasant is starved, naked, and roofless, the bare name of freemen-the lordship over his own person, the power to choose and will-are blessings beyond food, raiment, or shelter; possessing which, the want of every comfort of life is yet more tolerable than their fullest enjoyment without them.

12. Human beings were behaving as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.

13. Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.

14. Man is free; but not unless he believes he is[.]

15. No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.

16. Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy; I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of them is not my concern.

17. To do the same thing over and over again is not only boredom: it is to be controlled by rather than to control what you do.

18. She made the decision that her existence had lost its meaning. And you cannot judge that.

19. If you pick the right people and give them the opportunity to spread their wings and put compensation as a carrier behind it you almost don't have to manage them.

20. That's one thing that's always, like, been a difference between, like, the performing arts, and being a painter, you know. A painter does a painting, and he paints it, and that's it, you know. He has the joy of creating it, it hangs on a wall, and somebody buys it, and maybe somebody buys it again, or maybe nobody buys it and it sits up in a loft somewhere until he dies. But he never, you know, nobody ever, nobody ever said to Van Gogh, 'Paint a Starry Night again, man!' You know? He painted it and that was it.

21. The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody would be to not be used for anything by anybody. Thank you for using me, even though I didn't want to be used by anybody.

22. People are not here to meet your expectations.

23. Do not let either the medical authorities or the politicians mislead you. Find out what the facts are, and make your own decisions about how to live a happy life and how to work for a better world.

24. You have to be careful who you let define your good.

25. As of today, I have absolutely no regrets. I think I am a mature person who can take things in stride. I'm grateful for people in my past. They helped me get to where I am, wherever that is. But now, I am thinking for myself and sitting in on all the business transactions.

26. 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.

27. I am not going to be dictated to by fans, certainly. I am dictated enough to by my record company to last me a million years.

28. Human beings will find a balanced situation when they do good things not because God says it, but because they feel like doing them.

29. The number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves is very small indeed.

30. All men have a right to remain in a state of nature as long as they please; and in case of intolerable oppression, civil or religious, to leave the society they belong to, and enter into another.

31. To find yourself, think for yourself.

32. Marriage, to women as to men, must be a luxury, not a necessity; an incident of life, not all of it. And the only possible way to accomplish this great change is to accord to women equal power in the making, shaping and controlling of the circumstances of life.

33. Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.

34. Success is doing what you want to do, when you want, where you want, with whom you want, as much as you want.

35. 'Several of my critics have said: 'Bowerman just tacks up a piece of paper in the locker room and turns his runners loose.' They're partially right. I do give the athletes a relatively free rein and for good reason. One of my principles is: Don't overcoach.''

36. A self-willed man obeys a different law, the one law I, too, hold absolutely sacred - the human law in himself, his own individual will.

37. I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.

38. When it came to formal classes, I was a slacker. But I've always been a diligent autodidact and can teach myself virtually any subject - if I have a serious interest in it.

39. I don't give advice. I can't tell anybody what to do. Instead I say this is what we know about this problem at this time. And here are the consequences of these actions.

40. 'Either you think - or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.'

41. Morality is thus the relation of actions to the autonomy of the will, that is, to a possible giving of universal law through its maxims. An action that can coexist with the autonomy of the will is permitted; one that does not accord with it is forbidden. A will whose maxims necessarily harmonize with the laws of autonomy is a holy, absolutely good will. The dependence upon the principle of autonomy of a will that is not absolutely good (moral necessitation) is obligation. This, accordingly, cannot be attributed to a holy being. The objective of an action from obligation is called duty.

42. I'm not going to be joining ZZ Top. You know they can't play my stuff. It's too complicated.

43. I can never consent to being dictated to.

44. I don't want to be limited by other people's opinions. (1988)

45. Man loves liberty, even if he does not know that he loves it. He is driven by it and flees from where it does not exist.

46. I don't like being told what to do.

47. Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

48. Nobody tells me fuck all!

49. Politics is the art of stopping people from minding their own business.

50. Freedom means the right to be stupid.

51. There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point.

52. I will accept the rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

53. A woman is not property, and husbands who think otherwise are living in a dreamworld.

54. Marriages are made by men and women; not by society; not by the state; not by the church; not by supernatural beings.

55. A Nation spoke to a Nation, A Queen sent word to a Throne: 'Daughter am I in my mother's house, But mistress in my own. The gates are mine to open, As the gates are mine to close, And I set my house in order,' Said our Lady of the Snows.

56. I have grown weary of the winds of heaven. I will not be a reed to hold the sound Of whatsoever breath the gods may blow, Turning my torment into music for them. They gave me life; the gift was bountiful, I lived with the swift singing strength of fire, Seeking for beauty as a flame for fuel - Beauty in all things and in every hour. The gods have given life - I gave them song; The debt is paid and now I turn to go.

57. The only abuse of drugs is the control of drugs by other people. ...The only control is self-control.

58. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

59. Do everything to demonstrate, and in the most emphatic manner, our sympathy for the Moslems, their autonomy, independence, etc.

60. Freedom exalts power; and, as is always the collateral effect of increasing strength, tends to induce a spirit of liberality. Coercion stifles power, and engenders all selfish desires, and all the mean artifices of weakness. Coercion may prevent many transgressions; but it robs even actions which are legal of a portion of their beauty. Freedom may lead to many transgressions, but it lends even to vices a less ignoble form.

61. I'd rather put a fucking gun to my head than live in your state

62. 'God, it seems has left me now. But it's okay, 'cause maybe I'll make up my own God, and have a little tea party of mine own'- 'Drive In Drive Out', July 10th, 2005. Mansfield, Massachusetts

63. 'The Female Eunuch' is a fitful, passionate, scattered text, not cohesive enough to qualify as a manifesto. It's all over the place, impulsive and fatally naive - which is to say it is the quintessential product of its time. So was Greer. ... If Greer were a bit more honest and had a bit more perspective, she'd have a useful message to relay to young women about the perils of confusing sexual autonomy with the real but ephemeral ability to manipulate men. She could elucidate the difference between a sexual freedom that abuses body and soul and a sexual freedom that cherishes and respects them. But Greer has always spoken directly from the tangles of her personal experience, shamelessly extrapolating from her own condition to the rest of womankind and seemingly unaware of her presumption. ... In the '70s, she admonished women who lacked her confidence, stylishness and libido for their timorousness. Today, feeling betrayed, she's become grim and hectoring, a feminist more cartoonishly man-hating than the ones she supposedly defied in the '70s, nattering on about body hair and bras.

64. Do not confuse 'duty' with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect. But there is no reward at all for doing what other people expect of you, and to do so is not merely difficult, but impossible. It is easier to deal with a footpad than it is with the leech who wants 'just a few minutes of your time, please - this won't take long.' Time is your total capital, and the minutes of your life are painfully few. If you allow yourself to fall into the vice of agreeing to such requests, they quickly snowball to the point where these parasites will use up 100 percent of your time - and squawk for more! So learn to say No - and to be rude about it when necessary. Otherwise you will not have time to carry out your duty, or to do your own work, and certainly no time for love and happiness. The termites will nibble away your life and leave none of it for you. (This rule does not mean that you must not do a favor for a friend, or even a stranger. But let the choice be yours. Don't do it because it is 'expected' of you.)