These autonomous quotes will inspire you. Autonomous acting is in accordance with one’s moral duty rather than one’s desires.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging autonomous quotes, autonomous sayings, and autonomous proverbs.
Famous Autonomous Quotes
- “Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations.” ~ Vaclav Havel
- “Today we are raised with the notion that to be secure is to be financially autonomous. Amassing wealth is viewed as the primary rite of passage to a secure, autonomous existence.” ~ Jeremy Rifkin
- “The one thing about program television that’s absolutely incompatible with any concept of art is that all decisions have to be made by program directors, whereas art is autonomous. It may be dependent, but it knows no superiors.” ~ Alexander Kluge
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“The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.” ~ Theodor Adorno
- “Osama bin Laden, the person, more likely serves the function of a stand-in. Compare the new terrorists with partisans or conventional terrorists in Israel. These people often fight in a decentralized manner in small, autonomous units, too.” ~ Jurgen Habermas
- “Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations. Without internal peace, that is, peace among citizens and between the citizens and the state, there can be no guarantee of external peace.” ~ Vaclav Havel
- “There’s a certain amount of sympathy here for the Bush administration’s problem, which is they would like to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they would like to have the Kurds autonomous.” ~ Les Aspin
- “In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value, this sound symbolism becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified.” ~ Roman Jakobson
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“In Boston they have gone from large autonomous high schools to smaller schools within the same building.” ~ Michael Welch
- “This nation can no longer tolerate the autonomous conduct of any single service. A waste of the resources of America in spendthrift defense is an invitation to disaster for America.” ~ Louis A. Johnson
- “Listen — strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.” ~ Michael Palin
- “I mean, if I went ’round saying I was an emperor, just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away!” ~ Graham Chapman
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“Listen, strange women lyin’ in ponds distributin’ swords is no basis for a system of government.” ~ Graham Chapman
- “All great enterprises have a pearl of faith at their core, and this must be ours: that Americans are still a people born to liberty.” ~ Mitch Daniels
- “The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when we were young.” ~ James Hollis
- “Technologically, modern man does everything he can do-he functions on this single boundary principle. Modern man, seeing himself as autonomous, with no personal-infinite God who has spoken, has no adequate universal to supply an adequate second boundary condition; and man being fallen is not only finite, but sinful. Thus man’s pragmatically made choices have no reference point beyond human egotism. It is dog eat dog, man eat man, man eat nature.” ~ Francis Schaeffer
- “God has ordained the state as a delegated authority; it is not autonomous. The state is to be an agent of justice, to restrain evil by punishing the wrongdoer, and to protect the good in society. When it does the reverse, it has no proper authority. It is then a usurped authority and as such it becomes lawless and is tyranny.” ~ Francis Schaeffer
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“The essence of self-fulfillment and autonomous culture is an unshakable egotism.” ~ H. L. Mencken
- “The bizarre thing about the anthropocene is that never has humanity been more powerful and never have individual humans felt so powerless. This is because so much that drives the circumstances of the anthropocene is the aggregation of apparently negligible acts, often amplified by technology, rather than decisive acts by autonomous decision-makers.” ~ Dale Jamieson
- “Word is murder of a thing, not only in the elementary sense of implying its absence – by naming a thing, we treat it as absent, as dead, although it is still present – but above all in the sense of its radical dissection: the word ‘quarters’ the thing, it tears it out of the embedment in its concrete context, it treats its component parts as entities with an autonomous existence: we speak about color, form, shape, etc., as if they possessed self-sufficient being.” ~ Slavoj Žižek
- “Once upon a time … the only autonomous intelligences we humans knew of were us humans. We thought then that if humankind ever devised another intelligence that it would be the result of a huge project … a great mass of silicon and ancient transistors and chips and circuit boards … a machine with lots of networking circuits, in other words, aping-if you will pardon the expression-the human brain in form and function. Of course, AIs did not evolve that way. They sort of slipped into existence when we humans were looking the other way.” ~ Dan Simmons
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“Nature is always trying to tell us that we are not so superior or independent or alone or autonomous as we may think.” ~ Wendell Berry
- “The dancer, or dancers, must transform the stage for the audience as well as for themselves into an autonomous, complete, virtual realm, and all motions into a play of visible forces in unbroken, virtual time…Both space and time, as perceptible factors, disappear almost entirely in the dance illusion.” ~ Susanne Katherina Langer
- “The economy – once a great scatter of small productive units in autonomous balance, has become dominated by two or three hundred giant corporations, administratively and politically interrelated… The political order, once a decentralized set of several dozen states with a weak spinal cord, has become a centralized executive establishment which has taken up into itself many powers previously scattered… The military order, once a slim establishment in a context of distrust fed by state militia, has become the largest and most expensive feature of government.” ~ C. Wright Mills
- “While much of modern behavioral and social science treats individuals as autonomous agents, it is absolutely clear that the way we think and act is enormously influenced by the culture in which we live. It also is clear that the major elements of modern culture-science, technology, law, music, and religion-have evolved over time in a quite concrete sense of the term. Mesoudi makes these arguments very well and his book is a very good read.” ~ Richard R. Nelson
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“there is every reason to fear that the State is growing ever more powerful, more autonomous, more indifferent to its own inhabitants.” ~ Charles A. Reich
- “In point of fact there are a certain number of values and of forces which are of decisive importance in our world civilization: the primacy of production, the continual growth of the power of the State and the formation of the National State, the autonomous development of technics, etc. These, among others – far more than the ownership of the means of production or any totalitarian doctrine – are the constitutive elements of the modern world. So long as these elements continue to be taken for granted, the world is standing still.” ~ Jacques Ellul
- “In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights. After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as advocates of gay marriage insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one’s autonomous choices in love, then the first requirement – the number restriction (two and only two) – is a similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of individual choice.” ~ Charles Krauthammer
- “The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.” ~ Susan Sontag
- “If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature – the nearest thing to a sacramental human activity acknowledged by secular society – it is because one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what’s there.” ~ Susan Sontag
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“Before a leader can be accepted, let alone succeed, autonomous professionals must agree to be influenced by that person.” ~ David Maister
- “It’s as though aesthetic value, quality, could be preserved only by concentrating on ‘absolute’ or ‘autonomous’ art: thus on visual art… that held and moved and stirred the beholder as sheer decoration could not.” ~ Clement Greenberg
- “When we come to the Babylonian Gemara, we are dealing with what most people understand when they speak or write of the Talmud. Its birthplace, Babylonia, was an autonomous Jewish center for a longer period than any other land; namely, from soon after 586 before the Christian era to the year 1040 after the Christian era – 1626 years.” ~ Joseph Hertz
- “Misfortune occurs or can occur to anyone, of any sort of character. The eudaimonic has more resources to avoid it (being in autonomous control of his appetites and assumptions) and more resources to deal with it if it occurs (being better able to put it in perspective and maintain his own evenness of self-mastery). Tragedy as a dramatic form is meant to foster the ethos of sophrosyne or moderation, “nothing to excess”; it nurtures a sense of distance from the dominant illusions and delusions that may infect even aristoi.” ~ Kenny Smith
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“Mine is not an autonomous imagination.” ~ Jay McInerney
- “Jazz presumes that it would be nice if the four of us-simpatico dudes that we are-while playing this complicated song together, might somehow be free and autonomous as well. Tragically, this never quite works out. At best, we can only be free one or two at a time-while the other dudes hold onto the wire. Which is not to say that no one has tried to dispense with wires. Many have, and sometimes it works-but it doesn’t feel like jazz when it does. The music simply drifts away into the stratosphere of formal dialectic, beyond our social concerns.” ~ Dave Hickey
- “The previous regime … reduced man to a means of production and nature to a tool of production. Thus it attacked both their very essence and their mutual relationship. It reduced gifted and autonomous people to nuts and bolts in some monstrously huge, noisy, and stinking machine.” ~ Vaclav Havel
- “With autonomous cars, you’re gonna see more consolidation. Once we have transport modules, you order off the phone and brands won’t matter anymore. When brands don’t matter, the auto industry ends. It’s got another 20 years.” ~ Bob Lutz
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“The organism cannot be regarded as simply the passive object of autonomous internal and external forces; it is also the subject of its own evolution.” ~ Richard Levins
- “The photograph is the most perfect picture. It does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style. Both in its way of informing, and in what it informs of, it is my source.” ~ Gerhard Richter
- “I’ve made a few albums in such an autonomous way; it often has been exhausting. It’s almost difficult to enjoy the process when you take on so much.” ~ Grant-Lee Phillips
- “All men are equal and free: society by nature, and destination, is therefore autonomous and ungovernable. If the sphere of activity of each citizen is determined by the natural division of work and by the choice he makes of a profession, if the social functions are combined in such a way as to produce a harmonious effect, order results from the free activity of all men; there is no government. Whoever puts a hand on me to govern me is an usurper and a tyrant; I declare him my enemy.” ~ Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
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“I’ve always got the road. Stand-up makes you so autonomous and self-sufficient that it really helps with that part of show business.” ~ Louis C. K.
- “What demon is our god? What name subsumes
That act external to our sleeping selves?
Not pleasure – it is much too broad and narrow, –
Not sex, not for the moment love, but pride,
And not in prowess, but pride undefined,
Autonomous in its unthought demands,
A bit of vanity, but mostly pride.” ~ J. V. Cunningham - “The difference between romantic love and friendship love is that romantic love involves a lot of compromise. It is a very giving type of love. With friendship, you can be a little bit more autonomous. You are not expected to compromise, in the same way. Maybe that’s why friendships tend to last longer.” ~ Olivia Wilde
- “Instead of being lost in your thinking, when you awaken you recognize yourself as the awareness behind it. Thinking then ceases to be a self-serving autonomous activity that takes possession of you and runs your life.” ~ Eckhart Tolle
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“I don’t know if you actually get something out of writing poetry. I think poetry is an autonomous muse that decides to come and sit on your couch.” ~ Alice Walker
- “[Government] is apprehended, not as a committee of citizens chosen to carry on the communal business of the whole population, but as a separate and autonomous corporation, mainly devoted to exploiting the population for the benefit of its own members.” ~ H. L. Mencken
- “The autonomous individual, striving to realize himself and prove his worth, has created all that is great in literature, art, music, science and technology. The autonomous individual, also, when he can neither realize himself nor justify his existence by his own efforts, is a breeding call of frustration, and the seed of the convulsions which shake our world to its foundations.” ~ Eric Hoffer
- “Obstinacy is a fault of temperament. Stubbornness and intolerance of contradiction result from a special kind of egotism, which elevates above everything else the pleasure of its autonomous intellect, to which others must bow.” ~ Carl von Clausewitz
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“The purpose of autonomous driving is to eliminate accidents.” ~ Warren Brown
- “When you stand up for yourself and try to be autonomous and self-determining, you’re called a lot of names that we all know and that are very common. You may lose your job. You may lose custody of your child. You may be blamed for the failure of your marriage even though it was the man who couldn’t tolerate an equal relationship.” ~ Gloria Steinem
- “The two greatest enemies of the individual in the modern world are communism and psychiatry. Each wages a relentless war against that which makes a person an individual: communism against the ownership of property, psychiatry against the ownership of the self (mind and body). Communists criminalize the autonomous use of capital and labor, and harshly punish those who “traffic” in the black market, especially in foreign currencies. Psychiatrists criminalize the autonomous use of the self, and harshly punish those who “traffic” in self-abuse, especially in self-medication and self-destruction.” ~ Thomas Szasz
- “If a woman makes a unilateral decision to bring pregnancy to term, and the biological father does not, and cannot, share in this decision, he should not be liable for 21 years of support. Or, put another way, autonomous women making independent decisions about their lives should not expect men to finance their choice.” ~ Karen DeCrow
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“All autonomous agencies and authorities, sooner or later, turn into self-perpetuating strongholds of conventional thought and practice.” ~ Ada Louise Huxtable
- “With any hallucinations, if you can do functional brain imagery while theyre going on, you will find that the parts of the brain usually involved in seeing or hearing – in perception – have become super active by themselves. And this is an autonomous activity; this does not happen with imagination.” ~ Oliver Sacks
- “Now these two questions Does there exist a material reality distinct from sensible appearances? and What is the nature of reality? do not have their source in experimental method, which is acquainted only with sensible appearances and can discover nothing beyond them. The resolution of these questions transcends the methods used by physics; it is the object of metaphysics. Therefore, if the aim of physical theories is to explain experimental laws, theoretical physics is not an autonomous science; it is subordinate to metaphysics.” ~ Pierre Duhem
- “What happened is that in the middle of my life I went away and in my own sense of hubris, pride, cynicism, thought, I am an autonomous being in the world, I can control things, I am God.’ But my experiment at being God failed! And they do have a great saying in AA: ‘Get down off the cross, we need the wood!’ And the important thing is to realise you are not the centre of the universe, you are not God.” ~ John Waters
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“The whole dear notion of one’s own Self-marvelous old free-willed, free- enterprising, autonomous, independent, isolated island of a Self- is a myth.” ~ Lewis Thomas
- “Broadly speaking, Keynesianism means that the government has a specific responsibility for the behavior of the economy, that it doesn’t work on its own autonomous course, but the government, when there’s a recession, compensates by employment, by expansion of purchasing power, and in boom times corrects by being a restraining force. But it controls the great flow of demand into the economy, what since Keynesian times has been the flow of aggregate demand. That was the basic idea of Keynes so far as one can put it in a couple of sentences.” ~ John Kenneth Galbraith
- “after a generation or two of shedding the deliberate political encumbrances to war … of dropping Congress from the equation altogether, of super-empowering the presidency with total war-making power and with secret new war-making resources that answer to no one but him, of insulating the public from not only the cost of war but sometimes even the knowledge that it’s happened – war making has become almost an autonomous function of the American state. It never stops.” ~ Rachel Maddow
- “Holland’s and Kauffman’s work, together with Dawkins’ simulations of evolution and Varela’s models of autopoietic systems, provide essential inspiration for the new discipline of artificial life, This approach, initiated by Chris Langton (1989, 1992), tries to develop technological systems (computer programs and autonomous robots) that exhibit lifelike properties, such as reproduction, sexuality, swarming, and co-evolution.” ~ John Henry Holland
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“The white race is the cancer of human history.” ~ Susan Sontag
- “Autonomous people, nations, and systems can promote each other’s welfare; they do not have to fight each other like those whose inner insecurity and immaturity continually demand the demarcation of limits and postures of intimidation.” ~ Christa Wolf
- “A city can only be reconstructed in the form of urban quarters. A large or a small city can only be reorganized as a large or a small number of urban quarters; as a federation of autonomous quarters. Each quarter must have its own center, periphery, and limit. Each quarter must be a city within a city.” ~ Leon Krier
Autonomous is the quality or state of being self-governing.
