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Self Determination Quotes

Quotes tagged as "self-determination" Showing 61-90 of 679
Avril Lavigne
“Why should I care what other people think of me? I am who I am. And who I wanna be.”
Avril Lavigne

Hugo Hamilton
“Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it's not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you've been to. I'm not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don't have to be like anyone else. I'm walking on the wall and nobody can stop me.”
Hugo Hamilton, The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood

Cormac McCarthy
“The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.”
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

Christopher Paolini
“I'll fight when needed, revel when there's an occasion, mourn when there is grief and die if my time comes...But I will not let anyone use me against my will.”
Christopher Paolini, Eragon

Esther Hicks
“If you knew your potential to feel good, you would ask no one to be different so that you can feel good. You would free yourself of all of that cumbersome impossibility of needing to control the world, or control your mate, or control your child. You are the only one who creates your reality. For no one else can think for you, no one else can do it. It is only you, every bit of it you.”
Esther Hicks

Elizabeth  Taylor
“I don't entirely approve of some of the things I have done, or am, or have been. But I'm me. God knows, I'm me.”
Elizabeth Taylor

Isaac Marion
“...wanting change is step one, but step two is taking it.”
Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies

Jack Welch
“Control Your Own Destiny or Someone Else Will”
Jack Welch

Dorothy L. Sayers
“In reaction against the age-old slogan, "woman is the weaker vessel," or the still more offensive, "woman is a divine creature," we have, I think, allowed ourselves to drift into asserting that "a woman is as good as a man," without always pausing to think what exactly we mean by that. What, I feel, we ought to mean is something so obvious that it is apt to escape attention altogether, viz: (...) that a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual. What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Penetrating, Sensible and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society

Sam Harris
“You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.”
Sam Harris, Free Will

Elizabeth I
“If I follow the inclination of my nature, it is this: beggar-woman and single, far rather than queen and married.”
Elizabeth I, Collected Works

Charlotte Brontë
“There are certain phrases potent to make my blood boil -- improper influence! What old woman's cackle is that?"

"Are you a young lady?"

"I am a thousand times better: I am an honest woman, and as such I will be treated.”
Charlotte Brontë, Shirley

Bryce Courtenay
“Always in life an idea starts small, it is only a sapling idea, but the vines will come and they will try to choke your idea so it cannot grow, and it will die and you will never know you had a big idea, an idea so big it could have grown thirty meters through the dark canopy of leaves and touched the face of the sky. The vines are people who are afraid of originality, of new thinking. Most people you encounter will be vines; when you are a young plant they are very dangerous. Always listen to yourself, Peekay. It is better to be wrong than simply to follow convention. If you are wrong, no matter, you have learned something and you grow stronger. If you are right, you have taken another step toward a fulfilling life.”
Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One

Mitch Albom
“The little things, I can obey. The big things—how we think, what we value—those you must choose yourself. You can't let anyone—or any society—determine those for you.”
Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson

Theodore Roosevelt
“The joy in life is his who has the heart to demand it.”
Theodore Roosevelt

Melvin Burgess
“You can do anything you want. You don't believe me. You think, she's out of her head. Yeah, I'm out of my head- on being me. What are you on? On being them. You don't even know. I bet you were never given a chance to know. ....Listen. You can be anything you want to be. Be careful. It's a spell. It's magic. Listen to the words.... You are anything...everyone, anyone. ...You listen to them, teachers, parents, politicians. They're always saying, if you steal you're a thief, if you sleep aroung you're a slut, if you take drugs you're a junkie. They want to get inside your head and control you with their fear. ...Don't play their game. Nothing can touch you; you stay beautiful.”
Melvin Burgess, Smack

Paul Auster
“I felt the taste of mortality in my mouth, and at that moment I understood that I was not going to live forever. It takes a long time to learn that, but when you finally do, everything changes inside you, you can never be the same again. I was seventeen years old, and all of a sudden, without the slightest flicker of a doubt, I understood that my life was my own, that it belonged to me and no one else.
I’m talking about freedom, Fogg. A sense of despair that becomes so great, so crushing, so catastrophic, that you have no choice but to be liberated by it. That’s the only choice, or else you crawl into a corner and die.”
Paul Auster, Moon Palace

Dorothy L. Sayers
“In fact, there is perhaps only one human being in a thousand who is passionately interested in his job for the job's sake. The difference is that if that one person in a thousand is a man, we say, simply, that he is passionately keen on his job; if she is a woman, we say she is a freak.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Penetrating, Sensible and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society

Jean-Paul Sartre
“Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.”
Jean-Paul Sartre

Dorothy L. Sayers
“What we ask is to be human individuals, however peculiar and unexpected. It is no good saying: "You are a little girl and therefore you ought to like dolls"; if the answer is, "But I don't," there is no more to be said.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Penetrating, Sensible and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society

Mary Wollstonecraft
“I love man as my fellow; but his scepter, real, or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man.”
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Richard G. Scott
“We become what we want to be by consistently being what we want to become each day.”
Richard G. Scott

Erik Pevernagie
“Why some people feel more comfortable in the “margin” of society, may simply be that it imparts them more breathing space, shores up their identity, embodies a gateway to self-determination, and confers them a sense of sovereignty, allowing more time for stressless apprehension and thoughtful reflection. (“If he doesn't play ball » )”
Erik Pevernagie

June Jordan
I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own
and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
may very well cost you your life”
June Jordan, Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems

Charlotte Brontë
“I am anchored on a resolve you cannot shake. My heart, my conscience shall dispose of my hand -- they only. Know this at last.”
Charlotte Brontë, Shirley

James Baldwin
“You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.”
James Baldwin

“Life has a tendency to provide a person with what they need in order to grow. Our beliefs, what we value in life, provide the roadmap for the type of life that we experience. A period of personal unhappiness reveals that our values are misplaced and we are on the wrong path. Unless a person changes their values and ideas, they will continue to experience discontentment.”
Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

Jane Austen
“What! Would I be turned back from doing a thing that I had determined to do, and that I knew to be right, by the airs and interference of such a person, or any person I may say? No, I have no idea of being so easily persuaded. When I have made up my mind, I have made it.”
Jane Austen, Persuasion

Terence McKenna
“Reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”
Terence McKenna, History Ends in Green: Gaia, Psychedelics and the Archaic Revival