Maya Angelou Quotes

When we're growing up there are all sorts of people telling us what to do when really what we need is space to work out who to be.

I just don't conform very well.

I was who I was in high school in accordance with the rules of conduct for a normal person, like obeying your mom and dad. Then I got out of high school and moved out of the house, and I just started, for lack of a better term, running free.

We have to wake up. We have to refuse to be a clone.

Growing up in the '50s and being in the '60s, in that revolutionary time space, I thought freedom was what I was looking for. Slowly but surely, it became clear that the last thing I was interested in was freedom. Because if you're going to be free, you have to be free from something.

Being a teenager is chaotic because you're kind of coming into your own, but you're not an adult; you're fighting with your parents over responsibilities and freedom.

I don't care much about conforming.

I don't blame the average seventeen-year-old punk-rock kid for calling me a sellout. I understand that. And maybe when they grow up a little bit, they'll realize there's more things to life than living out your rock & roll identity so righteously.

I don't know what 15-year-old doesn't have a desire to separate themselves from their parents and prove their independence.

There are two visions of America. One precedes our founding fathers and finds its roots in the harshness of our puritan past. It is very suspicious of freedom, uncomfortable with diversity, hostile to science, unfriendly to reason, contemptuous of personal autonomy. It sees America as a religious nation. It views patriotism as allegiance to God. It secretly adores coercion and conformity. Despite our constitution, despite the legacy of the Enlightenment, it appeals to millions of Americans and threatens our freedom. The other vision finds its roots in the spirit of our founding revolution and in the leaders of this nation who embraced the age of reason. It loves freedom, encourages diversity, embraces science and affirms the dignity and rights of every individual. It sees America as a moral nation, neither completely religious nor completely secular. It defines patriotism as love of country and of the people who make it strong. It defends all citizens against unjust coercion and irrational conformity.

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.

I have a natural tendency to resist conformity.

My earliest memory of freedom was when I was about 14 and I stopped caring what people thought about me! I was so free and in charge! That whole year I was exploring myself, and I was so 'free' that I got sent away to boarding school.

When I dropped out [from a law school], everybody was disappointed... But I found that disappointing people is a good thing, because disapproval is freedom. Before that, I never realized how much I sought other people's approval. Once I figured that out, I was free to move on and seek the approval of other people, in comedy clubs and showbiz meetings.

To conform is to lose your soul

Some people dye their hair yellow or put rings in their noses. I decided I wasn't going to open an account. Put it the other way round - there was no reason that I should.

Being a man is the continuing battle for one's life. One loses a bit of manhood with every stale compromise to the authority of any power in which one does not believe.

Kept looking for something to be in with. Follow someone's blueprint. But you have to be on your own.

the world loves stupid labels. i wish we got to choose our own.

To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone. Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself.

Custom, madam, is the law of fools, but it shall never govern me.

You're not really free until you're free from trying to please everybody.

Her own contempt for any forms of pressure society might put on her was so profound and instinctive that she as instinctively despised anyone who paid tribute to them.

And only the very courageous will be able to keep alive the spirit of individualism and dissent which gave birth to this nation, nourished it as an infant, and carried it through its severest tests upon the attainment of its maturity.

People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.