yearning for autonomy Quotes

How I loathe the servitude people try to hold up to me as being so valuable. I pity the man who is condemned to it, who cannot generally escape it, but it is not the burden of his labor that disposes me in his favor, it is - it can only be - the vigor of his protest against it.

I have observed this in my experience of slavery, that whenever my condition was improved, instead of increasing my contentment; it only increased my desire to be free, and set me thinking of plans to gain my freedom.

Take me to you, imprison me, for I, except you enthrall me, never shall be free, nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Complaint is often the result of an insufficient ability to live within the obvious restrictions of this god damned cage.

A craving for freedom and independence is generated only in a man still living on hope.

I grow ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty years have I served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don't know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief day after day, all the golden hours of the day between ten and four without ease or interposition ... these pestilential clerk-faces always in one's dish. O for a few years between the grave and the desk!

It is a bad thing to perform menial duties even for the sake of freedom; to fight with pinpricks, instead of with clubs. I have become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness, and of our bowing and scraping, dodging, and hair-splitting over words. Consequently, the government has given me back my freedom.

All I've ever wanted to do was create freedom.

I wanted to be on my own. I couldn't wait to be on my own. It did not scare me. I was dependent my parents. I wasn't dependent government, but I was dependent on my parents. I started working essentially when I was 16, but I was still dependent on my parents. I couldn't wait to be on my own.

The American people, I think, are tired of being told. They're tired of being told this is as good as it gets. They're tired of being told, like Ronald Reagan used to say, that little intellectual elite in a far distant capital can plan our lives better for us than we can plan them for ourselves.

If I had my mouth, I would bite; if I had my liberty, I would do my liking. In the meantime, let me be that I am, and seek not toalter me.

There is, first, the desire for strength, for achievement, for adequacy, for confidence in the face of the world, and for independence and freedom. Secondly, we have what we may call the desire for reputation or prestige