Economic Strategy Institute Quotes

This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.

No not pigeon holed me as an actor, or as a character, or as to what I could do - but what I would do... and the fact is the things you don't do are almost as important as as the things that you do.

You choose who you want to be.

Everybody eventually discovers that they are an individual with the power to affect their own lives and make it better or not.

On some level, we as human beings can be who we want to be.

One creates oneself.

Anybody can be anybody.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

In the end, I want to be able to say, 'My life was what I made it.'

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.

You shape your own destiny.

Everybody has their story - at some point you have to say, 'This is who I am: Now it's up to me to become what I want to be.'

We are not animals. We are not a product of what has happened to us in our past. We have the power of choice.

I am not God, but I am my creator.

I don't think anyone has made me except myself. I think I have done it on my own.

It is entirely up to us to invent our own lives.

You're not a product of your nature. That is your genetic makeup or your nurture, the things that have happened to you. Of course those things affect you powerfully, but they do not determine you.

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

You are where you are today because you have chosen to be there.

The implication is that this basic idea we have that we are controlled by our genes is false. It's an idea that turns us into victims. I'm saying we are the creators of our situation. The genes are merely the blueprints. We are the contractors, and we can adjust those blueprints. And we can even rewrite them.

Life consists not simply in what heredity and environment do to us but in what we make out of what they do to us.

The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.

My most earnest prayer is that every man and every woman will get it into his or her heart that they are in very deed the architects of their lives.

A man, as a general rule, owes very little to what he is born with - a man is what he makes of himself.

We are all, right now, living the life we choose.