Nina Totenberg Quotes

I had no choice in the decision to make myself available. I was not always doing things I wanted to do.

The only reason I'm coming out here tomorrow is the schedule says I have to.

Compulsion destroys cooperation.

Men never do good unless necessity drives them to it.

It is never easy to cleanly distinguish freedom and duty, consent and bondage, choice and compulsion.

I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way. Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

You don't want to try to protect yourself from the pain of a crisis. You want to learn everything you can from it.

What spurs a person to get more serious is highly individual, but I have found that no matter what a person's level of ability, motivation must come from within, or it will not last.

Change for your own sake, if you must, not for what you imagine another will ask of you.

Motivation is an inner force that compels behavior.

What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion.

If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.

People don't alter. They may with enormous difficulty modify themselves, but they never really change.

Some lessons are only delivered in the form of pain.

Is it possible, I wonder, for a man to truly change? Or do character and habit form the immovable boundaries of our lives?

The only way you can sustain a permanent change is to create a new way of thinking, acting, and being.

But the people who took the bus didn't experience the city as we experienced the city. The pain made the city more beautiful. The story made us different characters than we would have been if we had skipped the story and showed up at the ending an easier way.

Lessons learned are like bridges burned you only need to cross them but once. Is the knowledge gained worth the price of the pain, are the spoils worth the cost of the hunt?

People cannot be molded like clay.

Such are the differences among human beings in their sources of pleasure, their susceptibilities of pain, and the operation on them of different physical and moral agencies, that unless there is a corresponding diversity in their modes of life, they neither obtain their fair share of happiness, nor grow up to the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable.

When the devil drives, needs must.

Kindness is more powerful than compulsion.

Pain is inevitable. It is actually a great opportunity for growth, but when we blame or fail to take responsibility for our suffering, the pain becomes stagnant, and stagnant pain can have a compounding effect if left unchecked.

Pain that is not transformed is transmitted.

For a second I was just a kid – a kid who had lived all of his life in the same tiny town. Just a child. Because I knew I would have to live a lot more, suffer a lot more, to ever understand the searing agony in Edward’s eyes.