Quotes about Autonomy

If our feelings control our actions, it is because we have abdicated our responsibility and empowered them to do so.

...the right of the individual to elect freely the manner of his care in illness must be preserved.

He [Calvin Coolidge] is the first president to discover that what the American people want is to be left alone.

He said that when we finally did get the farm paid for we could tell everybody to go to hell. That was what he lived for, to own his farm without having to say please or thank you to a living soul.

I can stand on my own feet; I don't need any man's mahogany desk to prop me up

Freedom comes with the decision: it does not wait for the act.

I was not designed to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.

Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one.

A simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.

Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.

Reason is the tool men use to determine if their statements about reality are valid: there is no other. Those who do not or cannot reason are little better than slaves because their lives are controlled by the ideas of other men, ideas they have not examined.