self-sufficiency quotes

I don’t have maids or servants, and my husband and I love waking up early and going to the 24-hour supermarket when there is nobody else there.

I dropped out of NYU, moved out of my parent’s house, got my own place, and survived on my own. I made music and worked my way from the bottom up.

I do remember how it was to be poor. I do remember that in my early years, we had to grow and raise all of our food, even our animals. And I remember in my early life, we didn’t even have electricity. So it was very, very hard times then.

We should all grow our own food and do our own waste processing, we really should.

Black Americans, no more than white Americans, they do not want more government programs which perpetuate dependency. They don’t want to be a colony in a nation.

For me, it’s enough that I have the first and last word.

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one’s self?

I think that if all kids aspire to reach a point where they could feed themselves and a few of their friends, this would be good for the world surely.

All I wanted to do was write – at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn’t need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

If you give a person a fish, they’ll fish for a day. But if you train a person to fish, they’ll fish for a lifetime.

Fortunately for India, it has got a growing economy. If it is doing the right things with taxation and focusing on the right areas for human development, it is going to have no problem, over a period of time, taking care of its own needs.

We do not need the empire to give us anything.

Charity is injurious unless it helps the recipient to become independent of it.

She never envisioned a legal career for me, but she did think it was very important that I be able to support myself, and I think she would be pleased to see what has become of me.

Don’t bother people for help without first trying to solve the problem yourself.

The only meat I eat is from animals I’ve killed myself.

We must have government that builds stamina into communities and men. That makes men instead of mendicants.

The opportunities of America opened out to me the public schools. They carried me to the professional training of an American university. I began by working with my own hands for my daily bread.

The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.

The function of posterity is to look after itself.

Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.

I have heard of Texas pioneers living without bread or anything made from the cereals for months without suffering, using the breast-meat of wild turkeys for bread. Of this kind, they had plenty in the good old days when life, though considered less safe, was fussed over the less.

Wisdom allows nothing to be good that will not be so forever; no man to be happy but he that needs no other happiness than what he has within himself; no man to be great or powerful that is not master of himself.

Helping those who have been struck by unforeseeable misfortunes is fundamentally different from making dependency a way of life.

Agriculture not only gives riches to a nation, but the only riches she can call her own.

The class of citizens who provide at once their own food and their own raiment, may be viewed as the most truly independent and happy.

If you want to cut your own throat, don’t come to me for a bandage.

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

In my youth, I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.

Anything in any way beautiful derives its beauty from itself and asks nothing beyond itself. Praise is no part of it, for nothing is made worse or better by praise.

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.