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Independence Quotes

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Independence Quotes

“When you can find your own axis, you can revolve around it, for when you revolve your life on someone outside of you, you lose your own alignment. Just as the earth revolves around its own axis daily and through this eternal gentle revolving it also revolves around the sun, if you don’t find your own axis and you don’t gently revolve, you cannot be for anyone. Then, once you have centered on your axis and someone else who has also centered on theirs is brought into your world, the two of you can come together and there is a collision of axes and you shift from your center. This is the sensation of ‘falling in love’.”

“What else was the vaunted British sense of fair play but a manifestation of our morality? Gandhi and Das's genius was that they realised that better than we did ourselves. They recognised that when it came down to it, the British and the Indians weren't that different, and the way to beat us was to appeal to our better natures — to make us comprehend the moral incongruity of our position in India.”

“I had no problem being on my own. My grandfather had raised me to depend on myself. My problems came when I tried to fit myself into someone else’s life, especially when that meant giving up a part of myself in the process. So I waited until I didn’t have to. Until it felt like someone fit effortlessly. Or maybe that’s too easy - maybe it’s more accurate to say that what was required to be with Owen didn’t feel like effort. It felt like details.”

“If I had been more independent in my thinking then, I would have thought the matter through to a conclusion. But in those days it was easy for me to leave tangled thoughts knotted, their loose ends hanging. I didn't want to explore the treacherous mazes that such thoughts led into. I didn't want to reach the end of those mazes, because there, I knew, I would find myself and I was afraid I would not recognize myself after having taken so many confusing directions. I was beginning to suspect that I was not the person I was expected to be, and took it as evidence that somewhere I had taken a wrong turning.”

“There are Tantrics who deliberately break taboos and social norms and then there are other Tantrics who, by means of their practices and the way that they practice, that to society in general, it may have the appearance of breaking social norms but in fact that is just the manifestation of the progress of their practice.”

“Men are never selfish. They’re smart. Women are always selfish. You want to be single? Selfish. You’re a wife and mother and do anything other than dote on your husband and children? Selfish. I want you and your sisters to learn to take that word as a compliment. Anyone who says that to you is trying to discourage you from doing what you want. That’s how you know you’re doing something right.”

“She [her childhood self] would be proud she escaped the narrative she had been force-fed her entire life. —Cecilia, twenty-five, married”

“When empowered with the right information, an adult of sound mind has the freedom and the autonomy to make informed decision(s). Their interest is not on who wins but who best represent their values. They should therefore not be forced through coercion and threats to surrender their universal suffrage to any puppets they aren't willing to bank their future on. Their choice should respected.”

“We all have vices, visible and invisible. Some we deliberately keep secret. Others we don’t even realize or we refuse to admit we have…Vices can be lots of fun, or they can turn your life into a living hell. Accept them for what they are, just another aspect of the mind’s creation, and you can enjoy them—if you choose—without being broken by them. - Zeena Schreck for VICE Magazine”

“Our gathering was not as strange a thing as it might have appeared. A xenophobe would see a company of foreigners in camouflage uniforms, carrying out military drills and calisthenics, and might imagine us to be the lead element of some nefarious Asian invasion of the American homeland, a Yellow Peril in the Golden State, a diabolical dream of Ming the Merciless sprung to life. Far from it. The General's men, by preparing themselves to invade our now communist homeland, were in fact turning themselves into new Americans. After all, nothing was more American than wielding a gun and committing oneself to die for freedom and independence, unless it was wielding that gun to take away someone else’s freedom and independence.”

“The principle of equality, which makes men independent of each other, gives them a habit and a taste for following, in their private actions, no other guide but their own will. This complete independence, which they constantly enjoy towards their equals and in the intercourse of private life, tends to make them look upon all authority with a jealous eye, and speedily suggests to them the notion and the love of political freedom. Men living at such times have a natural bias to free institutions. Take any one of them at a venture, and search if you can his most deep-seated instincts; and you will find that, of all governments, he will soonest conceive and most highly value that government whose head he has himself elected, and whose administration he may control.”

“...freedom is of more account than the height of a roof beam. I ought to know; mine cost me eighteen years' slavery. The man who lives on his own land is an independent man. He is his own master. If I can keep my sheep alive through winter and can pay what has been stipulated from year to year - then I pay what has been stipulated; and I have kept my sheep alive. No, it is freedom that we are all after, Titla. He who pays his way is a king. He who keeps his sheep alive through the winter lives in a palace.”