Independence Quotes

My cup was already brimming before I met him —after it runneth over.

~ Erica Goros

Make yourself your role model, because people who do not have qualities depend on the qualities of others to shape their own qualities.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

For it is in your power to retire into yourself whenever you choose.

~ Marcus Aurelius

for meobedience to another is the decayof self

~ Charles Bukowski

We who are born into this age of freedom and independence and the self must undergo this loneliness. It is the price we pay for these times of ours.

~ Sōseki Natsume

There’s a lot of things wrong with this country, but one of the few things still right with it is that a man can steer clear of the organized bullshit if he really wants to. It’s a goddamned luxury, and if I were you, I’d take advantage of it while you can.

~ Hunter S. Thompson

Sharing your life with someone will have much more meaning coming from a place of independence rather than co-dependence.

~ Gary Hopkins

In yourself right now is all the place you've got.

~ Flannery O'connor

In the inner courtroom of my mind, mine is the only judgment that counts.

~ Nathaniel Branden

Injustice in the end produces independence.

~ Voltaire

The loss of a reliance on others often helpfully forces a more sophisticated rumination that enables the opening of previously unknown avenues.

~ Pawan Mishra

This is your life, not someone else's. It is your own feeling of what is important, not what people will say. Sooner or later, you are bound to discover that you cannot please all of the people around you all of the time. Some of t hem will attribute to you motives you never dreamed of. Some of them will misinterpret your words and actions, making them completely alien to you. So you had better learn fairly early that you must not expect to have everyone understand what you say and what you do.

~ Eleanor Roosevelt

no girl can permanently bolster up a lame-duck visitor, because these day it's every girl for herself.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Keep your problems to yourself, if its too much for you, kill it slowly till it disappears from your life.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Anxiety, and the physical symptoms it causes, is merely fog along the path of independence and discovery.

~ Charles F. Glassman

This year I've been figuring out who I am. I've been learning what I want, and it's the same as what I've always wanted, only I'm different. Leaders live and grow and learn. They run into dragons, get burned by them, temper their swords in the fire, and take them on. That's what I want to do. That's who I want to be. Not the girl cowering in her father's office. I want to be fierce.

~ Robin York

When we stop looking for someone to complete us, we find completion in ourselves.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

The foundation of joyful independence is being content with yourself, self-love.

~ Bryant Mcgill

To love oneself is to struggle to rediscover and maintain your uniqueness

~ Leo Buscaglia

If you're saving, you're succeeding

~ Steve Burkholder

If somebody tells me what to do, I will do my best not to do it.

~ Hiroko Sakai

An indoor man eats nothing, except that which is prepared and served by his mother with lots of insults, an outdoor man eats that which he buys, prepares, served and eaten with lots of respect.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

True respect comes when we fend for ourselves without the aid of anyone, and when we owned something and say, 'this is my own'! Not necessarily as a way of boasting of our abundance and grace, but having a feeling that we can use it without obstruction, or being asked to return the favor.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

We can only save ourselves through elevating our individual consciousness, by realizing there is already completeness within, and exercising as much considerate independence, respect and fairness as is possible.

~ Bryant Mcgill

The introduction to horrors so young impressed on me just how helpless and vulnerable I was. Parents are supposed to empower their children to live without them but in my family, I wasn’t given permission to be my own person. I thought I needed them to live and then they abandoned me. It’s no wonder I felt so unempowered well into my adult years.

~ Christina Enevoldsen

Richard Wright and his Negro intellectual colleagues never realized the plain truth that no one in the United States understood the revolutionary potential of the Negro better than the Negro's white radical allies. They understood it instinctively, and revolutionary theory had little to do with it. What Wright could not see was that what the Negro's allies feared most of all was that this sleeping, dream-walking black giant might wake up and direct the revolution all by himself, relegating his white allies to a humiliating second-class status. The negro's allies were not about to tell the Negro anything that might place him on the path to greater power and independence in the revolutionary movement than they themselves had. The rules of the power game meant that unless the American Negro taught himself the profound implications of his own revolutionary significance in America, it would never be taught to him by anybody else. Unless the Negro intellectuals understood that in pursuit of this self-understanding, they would have to make their own rules, by and for themselves, nationalism would forever remain--as it was for Wright-- a bewildering and vexing question.

~ Harold Cruse

The only people we want to blame are ourselves, because it will be ourselves that we rely upon.

~ Markus Zusak

The path to the ethnic democratization of American society is through its culture, that is to say through its cultural apparatus, which comprises the eyes, the ears, and the mind of capitalism and is twentieth-century voice to the world. Thus to democratize the cultural apparatus is tantamount to revolutionizing American society itself into the living realization of its professed ideas. Seeing the problem in another way, to revolutionize the cultural apparatus is to deal fundamentally with the unsolved American question of nationality--Which group speaks for America and for the glorification of which ethnic image? Either all group images speak for themselves and for the nation, or American nationality will never be determined.

~ Harold Cruse

What a man need is simply and solely independence volition, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

She would never truly be her own woman if she allowed fear and old memories to dictate where she would or would not go.

~ Mercedes Lackey

We’re depriving our kids of the chance to do the work of life for themselves.

~ Julie Lythcott-Haims

Young adults come to resent the people who did the thinking for them.

~ Julie Lythcott-Haims

There is something that's a great deal more important than parental approval: learning to do without it. That's what it means to become an adult.

~ Julie Lythcott-Haims

The undeniable paradox of human existence is that a person seeks closeness with other people while protecting his or her sanctified right of privacy. Each person must carefully guard their personal identity in order to give their life a unique purposefulness. Loving other people and nature is not mutually exclusive of a person maintaining independence of thought and action. A person need not surrender his or her own pursuit of personal excellence when maintaining a respectful and reciprocal relationship with a life mate.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Be as advertised.

~ Johnnie Dent Jr.

Being human makes us one. Being uniquely ourselves makes us individual. - Nancy S. Mure, Author of Unidentical Twins

~ Nancy S. Mure

People will always walk their own road and you cannot drag them onto yours. But, if you happen to wander into the path of a good person, you best take your mask off and shine or I promise, they will just walk on by.

~ Ava Ayers

Be an independent thinker at all times, and ignore anyone who attempts to define you in a limiting way.

~ Sherry Argov

It seems likely to me now that the very element in my character that took possession of me there on top of that mountain, the fierce independence that was suddenly mine, to remain inside me no matter how it scared me when I tumbled, was an inheritance. Indeed it was my chief inheritance from my mother, who was braver. Yet, while she knew that independent spirit so well, it was what she agonizingly tried to protect me from, in effort to warn me against. It was what she shared, it made the strongest bond between us and the strongest tension. To grow up is to fight for it, to grow old is to lose it after having possessed it.

~ Eudora Welty

Every time government attempts to handle our affairs, it costs more and the results are worse than if we had handled them ourselves.

~ Benjamin Constant