Quotes About Autonomy

“Absolute autonomy inevitably leads to tyranny.”

— Jack Provonsha

“Today there is a deep longing in our culture to reconnect to this spiritual world, for we are not whole without it. But our longing cannot be satisfied by embracing religious belief alone, no matter how emotional the embrace, for our longing is at root a hunger and thirst for the experience of interior realities. If, however, we are to forge a new relationship to the invisible world of spirit based on experience, what will distinguish it from the past is the modern necessity that it be based on our own autonomy as free individuals, able to think, decide, and act for ourselves.”

— Jeremy Nadler

“Travel became distinguishable from pain and began to be regarded as an intellectual pleasur ... These factors
the voluntariness of departure, the freedom implicit in the indeterminancies of mobility, the pleasure of travel free from necessity, the notion that travel signifies autonomy and is a means for demonstrating what one 'really' is independent of one context or set of defining associations
remain the characteristics of the modern conception of travel.
Eric Leed”

— Robin Jarvis

“With their concern for personal autonomy and individual freedom, anarchists more than any other socialists are aware of the inhumanity of both physical punishment and manipulative cure for anti-social members of the community. They look to reasoned argument and friendly treatment to deal with criminals and wish to respect their humanity and individuality.”

— Peter Marshall

“Become a parent. Lose your autonomy, but gain the wondrous superpower of The Magic Kiss that instantly dries tears and makes the pain of boo-boos disappear.”

— PatriciaV. Davis

“Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement.”

— Daniel H. Pink

“For animals, the confinement of the body is the confinement of the whole being, but a person can choose freedom even when he has no physical autonomy. In order to do so, he must know what choice is, and he must believe that he deserves it. By sharing stories, we keep choice alive in the imagination and in language. We give each other the strength to perform choice in the mind even when we cannot perform it with the body.”

— Sheena Iyengar

“I reject the idea that when young women make choices with which we disagree, they are acting without autonomy.”

— Roxane Gay

“The way you delegate is that first you have to hire people that you really have confidence in. You won't truly let those people feel a sense of autonomy if you don't have confidence in them.”

— Robert Pozen

“We have rejected the position of dependence which our createdness inevitably involves, and made a bid for independence. Worse still, we have dared to proclaim our self-dependence, our autonomy, which is to claim the position occupied by God alone.”

— John R.W. Stott

“The commandment to imitate Jesus does not appear suddenly in a world exempt from imitation; rather it is addressed to everyone that mimetic rivalry has affected. Non-Christians imagine that to be converted they must renounce an autonomy that all people possess naturally, a freedom and independence that Jesus would like to take away from them. In reality, once we imitate Jesus, we discover that our aspiration to autonomy has always made us bow down before individuals who may not be worse than we are but who are nonetheless bad models because we cannot imitate them without falling with them into the trap of rivalries in which we are ensnarled more and more.”

— René Girard

“The Kosovars were granted autonomy at the end of World War II, but then aspiring president Milosevic had the autonomy revoked in 1989, and the Dayton Accords of 1995, which ended the recent war in Bosnia and Croatia, failed to address the issue of Kosovo's status.”

— Sebastian Junger

“I like having my autonomy; I like going into the vegetable aisle with little fanfare. Very few go into that star category, in that uber above-the-title category. The rest of us, day in and day out, we're there to support what they do.”

— Beth Broderick

“The question is not whether Tibet should be independent but the extent of the autonomy that it is allowed. Tibet has been firmly ensconced as part of the Chinese empire since the Qing dynasty's military intervention in Tibet in the early 18th century.”

— Martin Jacques

“The Palestinian Arabs will have their autonomy, we will have our security. We shall live together.”

— Menachem Begin

“The patient's autonomy always, always should be respected, even if it is absolutely contrary - the decision is contrary to best medical advice and what the physician wants.”

— Jack Kevorkian

“I've learned that in order to achieve what I wanted, it made more sense to negotiate than to defend the autonomy of my work by pounding my fist on the table.”

— Thom Mayne

“I think there's great potential for autonomy, but we have to remember that we live in a world where people may have free will but have not invented their circumstances.”

— Thomas Frank

“The billable hours is a classic case of restricted autonomy. I mean, you're working on - I mean, sometimes on these six-minute increments. So you're not focused on doing a good job. You're focused on hitting your numbers. It's one reason why lawyers typically are so unhappy. And I want a world of happy lawyers.”

— Daniel H. Pink

“That those who entered such nursing homes needed meaning-a life, an identity, dignity, self-respect, a degree of autonomy-was ignored or bypassed;”

— Oliver Sacks

“In a modern Western culture, where the main idol is self; and its main doctrine is autonomy; and its central act of worship is being entertained; and its three main shrines are the television, the Internet, and the cinema; and its most sacred genuflection is the uninhibited act of sexual intercourse. ========== This Momentary Marriage A Parable of Permanence”

— Anonymous.

“Are you really saying there's only one way to God?' people immediately ask. Yet even as we ask the question, we reveal the problem. If there were 1,000 ways to God, we would want 1,001. The issue is not how many ways lead to God; the issue is our autonomy before God. We want to make our own way. This is the essence of sin in the first place - trusting our way more than God's way.”

— David Platt

“So I am totally aware that when I defend the autonomy of art I'm going counter to my own development. It's more an instinctive reaction, meant to protect the private aspect of the work, the part I am most interested in and which nowadays is at risk in our culture.”

— Thom Mayne

“The library was still giving trouble: a few books in some of the more obscure corners of the stacks retained some autonomy, dating back to an infamous early experiment with flying books, and lately they'd begun to breed. Shocked undergraduates had stumbled on books in the very act.”

— Lev Grossman

“We attach great importance to the peaceful development of cross-strait relations. But if our diplomatic relations is subject to China's goodwill, we will lose the autonomy of our diplomacy.”

— Tsai Ing-wen

“Unless we include a job as part of every citizen's right to autonomy and personal fulfillment, women will continue to be vulnerable to someone else's idea of what need is.”

— Gloria Steinem

“The human being either asserts autonomy by heroic self-assertion or seeks safety through fusing with a superior force: that is, one either emerges or merges, separates or embeds. One becomes one's own parent or remains the eternal child.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

“Nothing is more important than restoring a high degree of autonomy to educational experiences so that those who grow up in this society and troubled world have the best available tools to grasp the challenges that imperil our national and human future.”

— Richard A. Falk

“Just as the dignity of man is based on his freedom
to the extent that he may even say no to God
likewise, the dignity of a science is based on that unconditional freedom which guarantees its independent search for truth. And just as human freedom must include the freedom to say no, so the freedom of scientific investigation must face the risk that its results will turn out to contradict religious beliefs and convictions. Only a scientist who is ready to fight militantly for such an autonomy of thought may triumphantly live to see how the results of his research eventually fit, without contradictions, in the truths of his belief.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

“Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.”

— Pablo Neruda

“You have to record as many details as possible and achieve an order, without taking away the complexity of the real. To voice the real and at the same time to create an image that is a world in itself, with its own coherence, its autonomy and sovereignty; an image that thinks”

— Luc Delahaye

“Trade book publishing is by nature a cottage industry, decentralized, improvisational, personal; best performed by small groups of like-minded people, devoted to their craft, jealous of their autonomy, sensitive to the needs of writers and to the diverse interests of readers. If money were their primary goal, these people would probably have chosen other careers.”

— Jason Epstein

“To regard human beings as tools - as instruments - for the use of other human beings is not only unscientific but it is repugnant, stupid and short sighted. Tools are made by man but have not the autonomy of their maker - they have not man's time-binding capacity for initiation, for self-direction, and self-improvement.”

— Alfred Korzybski

“Autonomy means women defining themselves and the values by which they will live, and beginning to think of institutional arrangements which will order their environment in line with their needs ... Autonomy means moving out from a world in which one is born to marginality, to a past without meaning, and a future determined by others
into a world in which one acts and chooses, aware of a meaningful past and free to shape one's future.”

— Gerda Lerner

“A European currency will lead to member-nations transferring their sovereignty over financial and wage policies as well as in monetary affairs ... It is an illusion to think that States can hold on to their autonomy over taxation policies.”

— Hans Tietmeyer

“People who work for me know that they have a lot of autonomy. I like to know what's going on, and I'll offer my opinion, but I want people to feel that they can say to me, "That's great that you have that opinion, but, no, we're not going to do that."”

— Harry West

“Cinema is consistently making a claim to particular memories, histories, ways of life, identities, and values that always presuppose some notion of difference, community, and the future. Given that films both reflect and shape public culture, they cannot be defined exclusively through a notion of artistic freedom and autonomy that removes them from any form of critical accountability.”

— Henry Giroux

“People always want to have ownership and decision-making and autonomy.”

— Stan Shih

“We're into an age of excessive individuals, all right. We're into the age were independence, autonomy, convenience, sometimes selfishness. The new trinity of me, myself and I, seems to dominate. We know that's contrary to the very nature of the human person. The very nature of the human person needs God and needs other people.”

— Timothy M. Dolan

“If the Russians have gone too far in subjecting the child and his peer group to conformity to a single set of values imposed by the adult society, perhaps we have reached the point of diminishing returns in allowing excessive autonomy and in failing to utilize the constructive potential of the peer group in developing social responsibility and consideration for others.”

— Urie Bronfenbrenner

“Autonomy is the whole thing; it's what unhappy people are missing. They have given the power to run their lives to other people.”

— Judith Guest

“At the point when I switched from indoor to beach I had been playing indoor for 12 years. And, to be honest, to make a living indoors you have to go overseas. I am such a family girl and just wanted to be home, so that didn't appeal to me. Misty May was looking for a partner, I was looking to stay at home, and the beach just came calling. And mostly I stuck with it because I loved the challenge of it, but also just the autonomy of it. It's two on two, just you and your partner, you're not one of the herd. And the lifestyle is unbeatable.”

— Kerri Walsh

“Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Punishment renders autonomy of conscience impossible.”

— Jean Piaget

“There are insistent calls for autonomy, appeals for a new resource ethic based on the tradition of the commons, demands for the reinstatement of cultural primacy over corporate hegemony, and a rising demand for radical transparency in politics and corporate decision making. It has been said that environmentalism failed as a movement, or worse yet, died. It is the other way around. Everyone on earth will be an environmentalist in the not too distant future, driven there by necessity and experience.”

— Paul Hawken

“Just as man as a social being, cannot in the long run exist without a tie to the community, so the individual will never find the real justification for his existence, and his own spiritual and moral autonomy, anywhere except in an extramundane principle capable of relativizing the overpowering influence of external factors.”

— Carl Jung

“Humanism was not invented by man, but by a snake who suggested that the quest for autonomy might be a good idea.”

— R.C. Sproul

“The life-efficiency and adaptability of the computer must be questioned. Its judicious use depends upon the availability of its human employers quite literally to keep their own heads, not merely to scrutinize the programming but to reserve for themselves the right of ultimate decision. No automatic system can be intelligently run byautomatonsor by people who dare not assert human intuition, human autonomy, human purpose.”

— Lewis Mumford

“In a famous Middletown study of Muncie, Indiana, in 1924, mothers were asked to rank the qualities they most desire in their children. At the top of the list were conformity and strict obedience. More than fifty years later, when the Middletown survey was replicated, mothers placed autonomy and independence first. The healthiest parenting probably promotes a balance of these qualities in children.”

— Richard Louv

“It was outrageous that [Donald Trump] would be advocating [that] women who exercise their constitutional right and have autonomy over their healthcare decisions would be criminals, along with the doctors that served them. He did try to walk it back - I think pretty unconvincingly.”

— Hillary Clinton