394 Independence Quotes

Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.

Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment.

It is a comfortable feeling to know that you stand on your own ground. Land is about the only thing that can't fly away.

You have your thoughts and I have mine. This is the fact and you can't change it even if you kill me.

I was never very interested in boys - and there were plenty of them - vying with one another to see how many famous women they would get into the hay.

I don't keep any close friends. I don't keep any secrets. I don't need friends. I just tell everybody everything, that's all.

Sundance is weird. The movies are weird - you actually have to think about them when you watch them.

I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.

And why should we, of all people, expect the proud new developing nations to see the world precisely as we see it? Was any new nation ever more outspoken, independent and unaligned than the young America of Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln?

The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence.

There is nothing I congratulate myself on more heartily than on never having joined a sect.

The history of this country was made largely by people who wanted to be left alone. Those who could not thrive when left to themselves never felt at ease in America.

By circumstance and perhaps also by inclination, I think in complete intellectual isolation. To expect others to help me think seems to me almost like expecting them to help me digest my food.

In erotic love, two people who were separate become one. In motherly love, two people who were one become separate. The mother must not only tolerate, she must wish and support the child's separation.

The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent.

Remember that as a teenager you are in the last stage of your life when you will be happy to hear the phone is for you.

It's past parsons to console us: No, nor no doctor fetch for me: I can die without my bolus; Two of a trade, lass, never agree! Parson and Doctor!--don't they love rarely Fighting the devil in other men's fields! Stand up yourself and match him fairly: Then see how the rascal yields!

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

There is nothing that gives a man consequence, and renders him fit for command, like a support that renders him independent of everybody but the State he serves.

Every man is working out his destiny in his own way and nobody can be of any help except by being kind, generous, and patient.

In the progress of personality, first comes a declaration of independence, then a recognition of interdependence.

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.

Like Rousseau, whom he resembles even more than he resembles Voltaire, Shaw never gave a social form to his assertiveness, never desired to arrive and to assimilate himself, or wield authority as of right.

I showed up in L.A. with $500 and a backpack and I stayed at a shelter, so nobody handed me anything. I worked for every single thing that I have.

People who worked with me or knew me still called me the 'world's fastest human' because I almost never stopped. I'd found that I could get more done with no regular job or regular hours at all, but by being on my own, flying to speak here, help with a public relations campaign for some client there, tape my regular jazz radio show one morning at 5:00 a.m. before leaving on a plane for another city or another continent three hours later to preside over a major sporting event.

The true Enlightenment thinker, the true rationalist, never wants to talk anyone into anything. No, he does not even want to convince; all the time he is aware that he may be wrong. Above all, he values the intellectual independence of others too highly to want to convince them in important matters. He would much rather invite contradiction, preferably in the form of rational and disciplined criticism. He seeks not to convince but to arouse - to challenge others to form free opinions.

Yes, I'm a Judeo-Christian. Jesus and Moses are in my heart, and... both of them were independents, by the way.

Don't smother each other. No one can grow in the shade.

A hero is a goddam stupid thing to have in the first place and a general block to anything you might wanta accomplish on your own.

Remember we're all in this alone.

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.

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

Long live the Cuban Revolution. Long live comrade Fidel Castro... Cuban internationalists have done so much for African independence, freedom, and justice. We admire the sacrifices of the Cuban people in maintaining their independence and sovereignty in the face of a vicious imperialist campaign designed to destroy the advances of the Cuban revolution. We too want to control our destiny... There can be no surrender. It is a case of freedom or death. The Cuban revolution has been a source of inspiration to all freedom-loving people.

One of the requisites of sanity is to disagree with the majority of the British public.

Tantra says there is nobody above you whom you have to follow, through whom you have to get your pattern.

Nobody tells me fuck all!

Insanity - to have to construct a picture of one's life, by making inquiries of others.

All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization that everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.

[As a screenwriter] I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.

Geniuses and supergeniuses always make their own rules on sex as on everything else; they do not accept the monkey customs of their lessers.

However painful the process of leaving home, for parents and for children, the really frightening thing for both would be the prospect of the child never leaving home.

Leaving home in a sense involves a kind of second birth in which we give birth to ourselves.

The Declaration of Independence is the grandest, the bravest, and the profoundest political document that was ever signed by the representatives of a people. It is the embodiment of physical and moral courage and of political wisdom.

There has never been upon the earth a generation of free men and women. It is not yet time to write a creed. Wait until the chains are broken - until dungeons are not regarded as temples. Wait until solemnity is not mistaken for wisdom - until mental cowardice ceases to be known as reverence. Wait until the living are considered the equals of the dead - until the cradle takes precedence of the coffin. Wait until what we know can be spoken without regard to what others may believe. Wait until teachers take the place of preachers - until followers become investigators. Wait until the world is free before you write a creed. In this creed there will be but one word - Liberty.

I had rather be a beggar and spend my last dollar like a king, than be a king and spend my money like a beggar! If it has got to go, let it go!

Women are far more intelligent - some of them are no longer the slaves either of husbands, or priests. They are beginning to think for themselves. They can see no good reason why they should sacrifice their lives to please Popes or Gods. They are no longer deceived by theological prophecies. They are not willing to suffer here, with the hope of being happy beyond the clouds - they want their happiness now.

The untented Kosmos my abode, I pass, a wilful stranger: My mistress still the open road And the bright eyes of danger.

McCain's yesterday's maverick. This is serious maverickism, Ron Paul.

I am the cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me.

Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne, He travels the fastest who travels alone.

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.

'Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.'

Think for yourself and question authority.

Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations. Without internal peace, that is, peace among citizens and between the citizens and the state, there can be no guarantee of external peace.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Russia does not want confrontation of any kind. And we will not take part in any kind of 'holy alliance'.

I pay no attention whatever to anybody's praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelings.

You don't have to buy from anyone. You don't have to work at any particular job. You don't have to participate in any given relationship. You can choose

In man, personality is usually defined with reference to self-consciousness rather than to individuality; but the power of reflection and self-knowledge is linked up, in our type of personality at least, with the new flight of individuality - conscious memory seems necessarily to imply a vast increase of independence, so that it is all one whether we define the possessor of personality as a self-conscious individual, or as an individual whose individuality is more extensive both in space and time than the material substance of his body. Personality, as we know it, is free compared with the individuality of the lower animals; but it is still weighted down with the body. There may be personalities which have not merely transcended substance, but are rid of it altogether: in all ages the theologian and the mystic have told of such 'disembodied spirits,' postulated by the one, felt by the other, and now the psychical investigator with his automatic writing and his cross-correspondences is seeking to give us rigorous demonstration of them. If such exist, they crown Life's progress...

...I would now say something, which I never said before ... It is the international convention, if it is not a law, that when independence is granted to a people of a country by a deed of cession, the sovereignty of that country is transferred to the people of the country that assigned the deed. If I were not the Leader of the Opposition and if I was not born in Fiji ... and held a brief for the Fijian people in the 1965 London Constitutional Conference, I would have made the Britishers sit up and think what they were doing to the Fijian people in this country. It was their country in 1874, it was their country in 1965 ... what was there to stop the Fijian people saying, 'Your Majesty give the country back to us.' The immigrant races - Europeans, Rotumans, Chinese, et cetera, would be looked after by us. They are our guests.

My belief is that if we live another century or so - I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals - and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton's bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.

Long live free Quebec!