Alberto Moravia Quotes

I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.

Even though we know freedom as an idea we're not really as free as we think we are.

As long as I live under the capitalistic system I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.

Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.

It is my wish to leave a message to the whole world from the universe, a message of love and peace to the people of the world.

Masculine observers, if the birth-mark did not heighten their admiration, contented themselves with wishing it away, that the world might possess one living specimen of ideal loveliness, without the semblance of a flaw.

People behave agentically, but they produce theories that afford people very little agency.

Censorship that comes from the outside assumes about people an inability to make reasoned choices.

Trapped. Sinking. Can't be myself. Made into what other people expect. Is that everyone's fate? Were the great individualists the products of their friends who wanted a great individualist as a friend?

How extraordinary people are, that they get themselves into such situations where they go on doing what they dislike doing, and have no need or obligation to do, simply because it seems to be expected.

You can't change people, but most importantly, unless you're their momma, you don't even know what's best for them.

It's the hardest thing in the world to be in a business where it's all about people accepting you, and you have a desperate need to be accepted, and yet you live in a, you operate in a society that's now very unaccepting.

The blind conviction that we have to do something about other people's reproductive behavior, and that we may have to do it whether they like it or not, derives from the assumption that the world belongs to us, who have so expertly depleted its resources, rather than to them, who have not.

Yet we are constantly annoyed, and the legislatures are kept constantly busy, by the people who have made up their minds that it is wise and conducive to happiness to live in a certain way, and who want to compel everybody else to live in their way.

I think forcing people to uncover their head is as tyrannical as forcing them to cover it.

The world consists mainly of love slobs who need other people's approval. Most people don't live their own lives very well.

Sometimes I worry more about losing weight than gaining weight, because this is how people know and accept me. I do feel like if I wanted to get in better shape, there might be a backlash of, Why isn't she comfortable with herself anymore? So I try to figure out what my own goals are.

The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.

Maybe ever'body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.

It definitely is something that can get frustrating, because you want to live life on your own terms, and it feels for a while like you can't. But I've come to understand that I got to have all these amazing experiences that other people don't have. So this is the trade-off.

After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they’d actually made some sort of choice.

Every one is degraded, whether aware of it or not, when other people, without consulting him, take upon themselves unlimited power to regulate his destiny.

People should always mind their own business. More trouble is caused in this world by interference than any other single thing.

Some people surrender their freedom willingly but others are forced to surrender it. Imprisonment begins with birth. Society, parents they refuse to allow you to keep the freedom you were born with. There are subtle ways to punish a person for daring to feel. You see that everyone around you has destroyed his true feeling nature. You imitate what you see.

We're supposed to procreate and society, god knows, is ferocious on the subject. Heterosexuality is considered such a great and natural good that you have to execute people and put them in prison if they don't practice this glorious act.