Suzanne Collins Quotes

So I'd much rather get across the concept of freedom. It's what's important to Indian children. The only way you can be free is to know is that you are worthwhile as a distinct human being. Otherwise you become what the colonizers have designed, and that is a lemming. Get in line, punch all the right keys, and die.

Those of us who submitted or surrendered our ideas and dreams and identities to the 'leaders' must take back our rights, our identities, our responsibilities.

You choose who you want to be.

What does it mean to be an individual? What does it mean to flourish?

If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.

I am not in this world to live up to other people's expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine.

My life is not to be somebody else's impact - you know what I mean?

I wanted to use my possibility to be an individual, and I suppose I have, no?

I didn't want people to decide what I was going to wear and what I was going to look like and how I should behave.

One doesn't want one's identity coerced.

I wasn't interested in exploiting myself.

I put myself on the line with my truth and my sexuality. That is my choice. My choice.

I don't want to be identified by any one role I do.

Others will always seek to define you based on what they think you represent or who they think you are. But you have to be the one to control what you do and what you say and how you present yourself.

If you allow men to use you for your own purposes, they will use you for theirs.

I'm not allowing my perspective to be dictated by the dominant culture.

I don't like defining myself. I just am.

Don't let others define you. You define yourself.

Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing.

I always had that yearning, that hunger, to one day be independent and be my own person and build my own world. The most fulfilling thing is to live a life where you have freedom.

The free, self-determining, self-developing soul may not walk its own path, however innocently, but must fit into the scheme and pattern …

We don't want power, we don't want to be congressmen, bankers, we want to be ourselves.

I think I've claimed the right to be any version of me that I want to be.

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

I never was a person who let people who have their ideas and their expectations of me dictate who I became.