Quotes about Independence

As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn't go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.

What you are doing is exploring. You are undertaking the first experience, not of the place, but of yourself in that place... nobody can discover the world for anybody else. It is only after we have discovered it for ourselves that it becomes a common ground and a common bond, and we cease to be alone.

The strict competences of independence, the formal mastery, the complexities of attitude and know-how necessary to life on the farm, which have been in the making in the race of farmers since before history, all are replaced by the knowledge of some fragmentary task that may be learned by rote in a little while.

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.

She was the captain of her soul

The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

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

He had been too successful, you see; his was that solitude of contempt and distrust which success brings to him who gained it because he was strong instead of merely lucky.

I reckon a man in a tight might let Bill Varner patch him up like a mule, but I be damned if the man that'd let Anse Bundren treat him with raw cement aint got more spare legs than I have.

the idea (not mine: your great-grandfather's) being that even at eleven a man should already have behind him one year of paying for, assuming responsibility for, the space he occupied, the room he took up, in the world's (Jefferson, Mississippi's, anyway) economy.

The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves. (1778 - 1830)

Since the Exodus, freedom has always spoken with a Hebrew accent.