Rebecca Solnit Quotes

I wanted control over what was said and what was not said, rather than holding my head down in shame.

Different women feel empowered in different ways, and it's not right to tell someone what they can and cannot do.

I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.

We have been educated into believing someone else's concept of the deity, and someone else's standard of beauty. You have the right to practice any religion and politics in a way that best suits your freedom, your dignity, and your understanding. And once you do that, you don't apologize.

If you are confident in yourself and however you want yourself to be presented, and you're doing well and doing it because you want to do it and not because someone is pressuring you, then more power to you.

I believe every one of us possesses a fundamental right to tell our own story.

Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.

To me, that is really fundamental to social justice: to have choices in life.

Once people who have been deprived of basic freedom taste a little of it, they want all of it.

I think one of the most important things I can give my children is the right to be themselves.

Collective freedom provides the basic conditions for people to narrate their own lives, hold power accountable, and embrace a capacious notion of human dignity.

Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it.

Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.

What world is there for us where our essential nature - and its right to live free - is one and the same?

I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free... so other people would be also free.

The quest for freedom, dignity, and the rights of man will never end.

Freedom is the open window through which pours the sunlight of the human spirit and human dignity.

Let me do me.

Understand that the right to choose your own path is a sacred privilege. Use it. Dwell in possibility.

Moral principles of liberty that endow a person with the right to claim and acquire property at the same time oblige that person to respect every other person’s equal right to do the same.

Don't ask f'r rights. Take thim. An' don't let anny wan give thim to ye. A right that is handed to ye fer nawthin has somethin the matter with it.

I am myne owene woman, wel at ese

Though the Negroes are fed, clothed, and housed, and though the Irish peasant is starved, naked, and roofless, the bare name of freemen—the lordship over his own person, the power to choose and will—are blessings beyond food, raiment, or shelter; possessing which, the want of every comfort of life is yet more tolerable than their fullest enjoyment without them.

Every human being deserves a say in the decisions that affect their lives; no one should be subject to the will of another.

I don't have a hard and fast rule about dignity. I'm concerned about being treated with respect, but if I make my own choices and kind of let 'er rip, I will.