Jack Nicholson Quotes

When you challenge other people's ideas of who or how you should be, they may try to diminish and disgrace you. It can happen in small ways in hidden places, or in big ways on a world stage. You can spend a lifetime resenting the tests, angry about the slights and the injustices. Or, you can rise above it.

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent.

I defied the machinery to make me its slave. Its incessant discords could not drown the music of my thoughts if I would let them fly high enough.

Ultimately what I end up writing about is helplessness and the flipside of that, empowerment.

At a certain point, when there's a barrier between you and what's right, eventually you have to decide you're not going to allow yourself to be subjugated.

Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.

For so long, I was controlled and manipulated by other people. Whatever people think of me, I'm finally doing what I want to do.

I enjoy making the decisions.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

You may lose your wife, you may lose your dog, your mother may hate you. None of those things matter. What matters is that you achieve success and become free. Then you can do whatever you like.

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.

Nobody wants to feel controlled or treated like a child.

You know, one of the ways we adapted to not being free was to think that our group identity was again, the way we were being black, and being down with the cards. That was the way we were going to get it. Unity was everything.

I like being in control of my own destiny, really.

Please don't tell me what I can't do.

I'm never going to let someone else tell me what I can and can't do.

You can't allow someone's hate to dictate your life.

No matter how bad things get, you can still walk away.

A slave cannot be freed, save he do it himself. Nor can you enslave a free man; the very most you can do is kill him!

The best things in history are accomplished by people who get tired of being shoved around.

The power of effecting changes for the better is within ourselves, not in the favorableness of circumstances.

I am no longer content to be the scared, obedient schoolgirl. Who are you, a stranger, to tell me what I can and cannot do?

We do not have to be victims of circumstance.

You cannot police me, so get off my areola

Don't let anything or anyone define you. You are what you are because of what you make of tough situations in your life.