It is naive to think that self-assertiveness is easy. To live self-assertively--which means to live authentically--is an act of high courage. That is why so many people spend the better part of their lives in hiding--from others and also from themselves.
Although I am an anarch, I am not anti-authoritarian. Quite the opposite: I need authority, although I do not believe in it. My critical faculties are sharpened by the absence of the credibility that I ask for. As a historian, I know what can be offered.
Think about the word mould for a moment. A mould is a device into which one crams and smashes something until it becomes the shape that they desire. Don't spend your life letting other people destroy you while they try and force you into their moulds.
We could not be fulfilled if we weren't inauthentic some of the time—inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires to throttle our children, poison our spouse, or end our marriage over a dispute about changing a lightbulb.
There is no night porter wandering about in King's. The authorities pay you the compliment, ugly gate-crasher, of treating you as a grown-up. And since we are not grown-up you and I, we will perform our midnight frolics as the inmates burn the midnight oil.
The ultimate authority of my life is not the Bible; it is not confined between the covers of a book. It is not something written by men and frozen in time. It is not from a source outside myself. My ultimate authority is the divine voice in my own soul. Period.
Do not believe a thing because you have read about it in a book. Do not believe a thing because another man has said it was true. Do not believe in words because they are hallowed by tradition. Find out the truth for yourself. Reason it out. That is realization.
Abandonment of slavery is also the banishment of the chimera of security. The world will not change overnight, and liberation will not happen unless individual women agree to be outcasts, eccentrics, perverts, and whatever the powers-that-be choose to call them.
The truth does not need a number of supporters for authenticity. One person among the lot can be the only truthful out of the ten; 11 people out of 12 may be on the truthful side. However, the truth is the truth irrespective of how many people like to embrace it!
If you refuse to accept what is, and choose to see what could be, then you set a course for yourself that makes others take notice of you, respect you, revere you. It is then that they become objects of your destiny instead of you playing a support role in theirs.
Surround yourself with people too afraid to speak, and you left yourself to only your own ideas. That could be disastrous. It was important to have men who would question you and see flaws in your plans, so long as you could control them. It was all about control.
(Patrick Henry) He understood that the home was the foundation of a stable society and that the authority a man "exercised within the larger society was rooted in the authority exercised at home." Thus ... the training ground for all sound leadership is the family.
The only thing in life that's really interesting is the contest. We are all contestants--whether we admit it or not. If I read 20 pages of a book and they're no good, I put it down. Maybe it's good after 100 pages, but I can't wait. The author lost.
You understand Teacher, don't you, that when you have a mother who's an angel and a father who is a cannibal king, and when you have sailed on the ocean all your whole life, then you don't know just how to behave in school with all the apples and ibexes.
Polarities of the 'authentic' vs. the 'inauthentic' are easily discernible in recreational modes. The criteria of authenticity are not necessarily objective but rather have to do with the rules by which the self allows or disallows its own experience.
