Autonomy Quotes

Dearest Madam: We your servants join together and thoughts it better to write you a nice loving letter which will tell you about all our wishes. We wish to have your laws in our towns … Plenty wars here in our country. Plenty murder and plenty idol worshippers …. We have spoken to the English consul plenty times about having an English government here. We never have an answer from you, so we wish to write you ourselves.

I have no intention of being a potted plant, and just getting watered every so often.

When you introduce something new to a country, you want to do it right. Generally, that means you have to do it yourself.

The enemy of individuality is groupthink.

To me the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet. That I haven’t understood enough. That I can’t know enough. That I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom… Those who tell you that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority: don’t think of that as a gift. Think of it as a poison chalice. Push it aside, however tempting it is. Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.

To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.

Do not tell people how to live their lives. Just tell them stories and they will figure out how those stories apply to them.

Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience.

Most people who ask for advice from others have already resolved to act as it pleases them.

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone, and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom, for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

No people likes to be ruled by foreigners.

Only freedom can make security secure.

Your life is yours to live, no matter how you choose to live it. When you do not think about how you intend to live it, it lives you. When you occupy it, step into it consciously, you live it.

I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.

Never follow somebody else's path; it doesn't work the same way twice for anyone... the path follows you and rolls up behind you as you walk, forcing the next person to find their own way.

My view was that government officials could not sit on the board of the central bank, and I am very happy that has been upheld.

Every true thinker for himself is so far like a monarch; he is absolute, and recognizes nobody above him. His judgments, like the decrees of a monarch, spring from his own sovereign power and proceed directly from himself. He takes as little notice of authority as a monarch does of a command; nothing is valid unless he has himself authorized it. On the other hand, those of vulgar minds, who are swayed by all kinds of current opinions, authorities, and prejudices, are like the people which in silence obey the law and commands.

If there were already a path, it would have to be someone else's; the whole point is to find your own way.

We reject segregation even more militantly than you say you do! We want separation, which is not the same! The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us that segregation is when your life and liberty are controlled, regulated, by someone else. To segregate means to control. Segregation is that which is forced upon inferiors by superiors. But separation is that which is done voluntarily, by two equals - for the good of both!

We are not fighting for integration, nor are we fighting for separation. We are fighting for recognition as human beings. We are fighting for human rights.

To live alone is the fate of all great souls.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.

He who does not enjoy solitude will not love freedom.