I don’t like being told what to do and kissing you-know-what to get up the corporate ladder.

I just usually go with my own taste. If I like something, and it happens to be against the law, well, then I might have a problem.

You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection.

Children need to get a high-quality education, avoid violence and the criminal-justice system, and gain jobs. But they deserve more. We want them to learn not only reading and math but fairness, caring, self-respect, family commitment, and civic duty.

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.

I hated to be treated as a child. I thought it was the worst situation.

Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

I’m not concerned with your liking or disliking me… All I ask is that you respect me as a human being.

‚Harry Potter‘ gave me back self respect. Harry gave me a job to do that I loved more than anything else.

There are other measures of self-respect for a man, than the number of clean shirts he puts on every day.

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

Work alone is noble.

Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force.

If there is only one thing in my life that I am proud of, it’s that I’ve never been a kept woman.

One thing I want to make clear, as far as my own rebirth is concerned, the final authority is myself and no one else, and obviously not China’s Communists.

Republicans are for both the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict the man before the dollar.

Mine is better than ours.

I hate all politics. I don’t like either political party. One should not belong to them – one should be an individual, standing in the middle. Anyone that belongs to a party stops thinking.

Better to die ten thousand deaths than wound my honor.

Real education enhances the dignity of a human being and increases his or her self-respect. If only the real sense of education could be realized by each individual and carried forward in every field of human activity, the world will be so much a better place to live in.

Throughout my years in business, I discovered something. I would always ask why you do things. The answers that I would invariably get are: ‚Oh, that’s just the way things are done around here.‘ Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks very deeply about things in business.

There are two kinds of pride, both good and bad. ‚Good pride‘ represents our dignity and self-respect. ‚Bad pride‘ is the deadly sin of superiority that reeks of conceit and arrogance.

I will never say something I don’t agree with or believe in… even if the reward is massive!

No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.

If you want to occupy the C-suite or the top one-tenth of 1% in any organization, you have to be obsessively devoted to your career at the expense of everything else. And women look at that, and they think, ‚No.‘

When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet in his private heart no man much respects himself.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

I think everyone should approach relationships from the perspective of playing it straight and giving someone the benefit of the doubt. Until he establishes that this is a game. And if it’s a game, you need to win. The best thing to do is just walk away from the table.

I think Americans generally are not used to working very hard, in terms of working for the collective. I think in our country we have taken individualism to its farthest reaches, possibly.

I never desired to please the rabble. What pleased them, I did not learn; and what I knew was far removed from their understanding.

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.

All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.

Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.

There are two kinds of people in this world. ‚I‘ people and ‚we‘ people. I’ve always tried to be a ‚we‘ person.

We’re always looking over our shoulders, ‚what they will think, what the press will think, what will this one – am I making the right career move?‘ When you’re young you have to do all that to survive, I suppose.

When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everybody will respect you.

I am who I am. That’s why my friends and peers respect and appreciate me. I don’t change or cater my actions to fit my surroundings. I’m myself 24/7. People appreciate that.

Respect your efforts, respect yourself. Self-respect leads to self-discipline. When you have both firmly under your belt, that’s real power.

The Public is merely a multiplied ‚me.‘

I’m just an individual who doesn’t feel that I need to have somebody qualify my work in any particular way. I’m working for me.

There are certainly a lot of things that still need to change when it comes to women in the workforce.

The minute you start compromising for the sake of massaging somebody’s ego, that’s it, game over.

What someone else does or doesn’t do has no effect on me and what I do.

I don’t want followers.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

At Columbia Law School, my professor of constitutional law and federal courts, Gerald Gunther, was determined to place me in a federal court clerkship, despite what was then viewed as a grave impediment: On graduation, I was the mother of a 4-year-old child.

I don’t kiss nobody’s butt.

If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.

If we are not free, no one will respect us.

A wise woman wishes to be no one’s enemy; a wise woman refuses to be anyone’s victim.

In our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up or else all go down as one people.

I won’t let people write anything they want to about me.

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

Base souls have no faith in great individuals.

I respect myself and insist upon it from everybody. And because I do it, I then respect everybody, too.

Many people resented my impatience and honesty, but I never cared about acceptance as much as I cared about respect.

A flippant, frivolous man may ridicule others, may controvert them, scorn them; but he who has any respect for himself seems to have renounced the right of thinking meanly of others.

Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.