Hamza Yusuf Quotes

People may not like what you do, people may not like how you do it, but these people are not living your life. You are!

People have a right to their own lives, and if you can't help somebody, you ought to get out of their way.

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

What other people think of me is not my business. What I do is what I do. How people see me doesn't change what I decide to do. I don't choose projects so people don't see me as one thing or another. I choose projects that excite me. I think the problem is that people refuse to understand what drag is outside of their own belief system.

A person should be free to do as he likes in his own concerns; but he ought not to be free to do as he likes in acting for another, under the pretext that the affairs of the other are his own affairs.

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.

Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given you by good people, by people who love you.

People will want you to behave a certain way, to make a certain choice because it reinforces the way they see the world...But you have to do what's right for you.

The people themselves, not their government, should be trusted with spending their own money and making their own decisions.

If you've done what you intended and if nobody tampered with it, then it's yours. And if people don't like it, then they just don't agree with you on that subject matter, and that's life.

Don’t worry about what people think, because once it’s all over the people who love you will make you what they want you to be, and the people who don’t love you will, too.

You have to let people express themselves in the way that they need to express themselves. You have to express yourself in any way possible, provided you're prepared to live with the consequences.

I still say I can do whatever I want as long as I'm not hurting anybody else. I don't understand why more people aren't like that.

Dealing with my own life takes priority over other people dealing with my life.

I cannot go and tell women what to wear and what not to wear; you have to decide on your own.

The government's appearing to be a necessary evil does not oblige people to trust it. We face a choice of trusting government or trusting freedom-trusting overlords who have lied and abused their power or trusting individuals to make the most of their own lives.

Everything in life, is a question of drawing a life, John, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it. You cant draw it for others. You can try, of course, but it doesn't work. People obeying rules laid down my somebody else is not the same thing as respecting life. And if you want to respect life, you have to draw a line.

I don't want to tell people what they should think.

We can't live other people's lives for them. Even if we love them.

It's no good protecting people or even looking after them past a certain point. One can't grasp more than a piece of anyone. Most of the rest can only be protected by themselves and the remainder by hired specialists and doctors and dentists and professional protectors.

My experience is that I find myself having to constantly define myself to others, day-in, day-out. The quote that's helped me the most through that is from Toni Morrison's "Beloved" where she says, "Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined" - so I find myself defining myself for other people lest I be defined by others and stuck into some box where I don't particularly belong.

Don't let other people decide who you are.

What other people think of me is not my business. What I do is what I do. How people see me doesn’t change what I decide to do.

Don't live your life to please other people.