Quotes about Autonomy

Although I am allowed to admire what is growing in the well-tended fields of my religious neighbors, I am not allowed to pull off the road and help myself. The things I envy have their own terroir , their own long histories of weather and fertilization. They do not exist to serve me, improve me, or profit me. They have their own dominion.

The meaning we give to what happens in our lives is our final, inviolable freedom.

If our parents fixed everything for us and did not allow us to do anything on our own, or intervened every single time, we would all grow up to be completely dependent.

It is surely time for men to think for themselves, and to throw off the authority of names so artificially magnified.

Well, everybody does it that way, Huck. Tom, I am not everybody.

Each man's preference is the only standard for him, the only one which he can accept, the only one which can command him.

This jugular vein psychology is based on the fallacy that your assertion or affirmation of self is an attack upon my self—or that my defining myself will somehow prevent or retard your self-definition. The supposition that one sex needs the other's acquiescence in order to exist prevents both from moving together as self-defined persons towards a common goal.

The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself. And the best way I can do this is to be who I am and hope that he will learn from this not how to be me, which is not possible, but how to be himself. And this means how to move to that voice from within himself, rather than to those raucous, persuasive, or threatening voices from outside, pressuring him to be what the world wants him to be. And that is hard enough.

Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.

I don't wish to be the symbol of anything. I'm only myself.

Never ask people about your work.

Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.