Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Comment on this quote Share via Email Print this Page [1-20] of 163 Self-Determination quotesSelf-Determination QuotesSelf-Determination Next 20 quotes It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.~ John Adams We hold that each man is the best judge of his own interest.~ John Adams Liberty, according to my metaphysics, is an intellectual quality, an attribute that belongs not to fate nor chance. Neither possesses it, neither is capable of it. There is nothing moral or immoral in the idea of it. The definition of it is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power; it can elect between objects, indifferent in point of morality, neither morally good nor morally evil. ~ John Adams The highest manifestation of life consists in this: that a being governs its own actions. A thing which is always subject to the direction of another is somewhat of a dead thing.~ Saint Thomas Aquinas No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.~ Hannah Arendt Life is a banquet - and most poor suckers are starving.~ Auntie Mame The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.~ Marcus Aurelius Freedom is not something that can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.~ James Baldwin Actually, it is not strange that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the human race was regarded as inert matter, ready to receive everything -- form, face, energy, movement, life -- from a great prince or a great legislator or a great genius. These centuries were nourished on the study of antiquity. And antiquity presents everywhere -- in Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome -- the spectacle of a few men molding mankind according to their whims, thanks to the prestige of force and of fraud. But this does not prove that this situation is desirable. It proves only that since men and society are capable of improvement, it is naturally to be expected that error, ignorance, despotism, slavery, and superstition should be greatest towards the origins of history. The writers quoted above were not in error when they found ancient institutions to be such, but they were in error when they offered them for the admiration and imitation of future generations. Uncritical and childish conformists, they took for granted the grandeur, dignity, morality, and happiness of the artificial societies of the ancient world. They did not understand that knowledge appears and grows with the passage of time; and that in proportion to this growth of knowledge, might takes the side of right, and society regains possession of itself.~ Frederic Bastiat In short, is not liberty the freedom of every person to make full use of his faculties, so long as he does not harm other persons while doing so? Is not liberty the destruction of all despotism -- including, of course, legal despotism? Finally, is not liberty the restricting of the law only to its rational sphere of organizing the right of the individual to lawful self-defense; of punishing injustice?~ Frederic Bastiat I have made all the calculations; fate will do the rest.~ Napoleon Bonaparte You have to ask yourself, 'Who owns me? Do I own myself or am I just another piece of government property?'~ Neal Boortz They: The makers of the Constitution: conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone -- the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.~ Justice Louis D. Brandeis People take different roads seeking fulfillment & happiness. Just because they're not on your road doesn't mean they've gotten lost.~ H. Jackson Brown, Jr. Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp. Or what’s a heaven for?~ Robert Browning Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it.~ Buddha All lawful authority, legislative, and executive, originates from the people.~ James Burgh The wish, which ages have not yet subdued In man, to have no master save his mood.~ Lord Byron The more solid the family foundation, the more likely you are to be able to resist peer pressure. Human beings are social creatures. We all want to belong, we all have that desire, and we will belong, one way or another. If the family doesn’t provide that, the peers will, or a gang will, or you will find something to belong to. That’s why it becomes so critical for families with young children to understand what a critical anchor they are.~ Dr. Ben Carson If for no other reason, personal pride should prompt every governor and state legislator to take a secessionist attitude; they were not elected to be lackeys of the federal bureaucracy.~ Frank Chodorov Next 20 quotes Share on Facebook Tweet Email Print