John Dos Passos Quotes

I haven't even had a life I could call my own, and you're ready to slot me into the grand design. Well, I don't think I want to go. I want to be my own design.

I leave you free to be yourself: to think your thoughts, indulge your tastes, follow your inclinations, behave in ways that you decide are to your liking.

Without private thoughts and actions, we can never truly be free.

I have an aversion to being mislabeled. Here's a label I'd accept: I'm an 'individual.' I'm someone who can't follow, and doesn't want to lead.

You can wear whatever, be whatever, do whatever you want.

The freedom to be an individual is the essence of America.

I think, in the end, we are all our own individual person.

You don't have to live anybody else's story.

Wait, I'm deciding to be my own individual self. And it looks nothing like what anyone else is doing.

Nobody can tell you what to do. No matter what they pay you. No matter what obligations you feel you owe them. Every second defines you. Be who you are, not who anyone else is, or who anyone else wants you to be.

I'm not everyone's cup of tea, but that's the great part: I don't have to be.

Whether it’s your taste in clothing, your needs in a relationship, or what you do for a living—don’t let anyone else be at the controls. Define yourself.

I was born alone, I'm gonna die alone. I have my own identity. I'm my own person, and no two people are the same.

I refuse to act the way someone expects me to.

I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.

You need to be your own individual.

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone, and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom, for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

I love to be individual, to step beyond gender.

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.

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

People tell you the world looks a certain way. Parents tell you how to think. Schools tell you how to think. TV. Religion. And then at a certain point, if you're lucky, you realize you can make up your own mind. Nobody sets the rules but you. You can design your own life.

I have the freedom to take chances, to say no. I have the freedom to be who I really want to be, rather than have to conform to this or that just to stay alive.

True freedom is the capacity for acting according to one's true character, to be altogether one's self, to be self-determined and not subject to outside coercion.

Being cool is being your own self, not doing something that someone else is telling you to do.

I pay for what I call eccentricity and my will to evolve.