self-determination quotes

I sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, not to make them American. Iraqis will write their own history and find their own way.

How one life turns out is not dependent on what people do to us or what they don’t do for us.

We prefer world law in the age of self-determination to world war in the age of mass extermination.

Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason.

For the sake of peace and justice, let us move toward a world in which all people are at last free to determine their own destiny.

Every man gotta right to decide his own destiny.

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.

It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.

Most people who ask for advice from others have already resolved to act as it pleases them.

I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.

Nobody can tell me where I can and can’t go.

I mean, I never liked being told what to do. It’s one of the reasons I dropped out of school.

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You’re on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who’ll decide where to go.

The awareness that health is dependent upon habits that we control makes us the first generation in history that to a large extent determines its own destiny.

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.

Just as a man would not cherish living in a body other than his own, so do nations not like to live under other nations, however noble and great the latter may be.

Freedom conceives that the mind and spirit of man can be free only if he be free to pattern his own life, to develop his own talents, free to earn, to spend, to save, to acquire property as the security of his old age and his family.

To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities.

No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.

Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish? Nothing else.

If you make up your own mind, you can only blame yourself.

Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.

The people themselves, and not their servants, can safely reverse their own deliberate decisions.

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.