Every human has four endowments- self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom... The power to choose, to respond, to change.
Stephen Covey

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
Abraham Lincoln

Part of your heritage in this society is the opportunity to become financially independent.
Jim Rohn

I was more independent than any farmer in Concord, for I was not anchored to a house or farm, but could follow the bent of my genius, which is a very crooked one, every moment.
Henry David Thoreau

I was always an independent, even when I had partners.
Samuel Goldwyn

No country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent.
Charles de Gaulle

In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
Karl Marx

The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.
Sigmund Freud

Charity is injurious unless it helps the recipient to become independent of it.
John D. Rockefeller

The class of citizens who provide at once their own food and their own raiment, may be viewed as the most truly independent and happy.
James Madison

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.
Leo Tolstoy

All mankind... being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.
John Locke

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
George Orwell

All the rights secured to the citizens under the Constitution are worth nothing, and a mere bubble, except guaranteed to them by an independent and virtuous Judiciary.
Andrew Jackson

In England the judges should have independence to protect the people against the crown. Here the judges should not be independent of the people, but be appointed for not more than seven years. The people would always re-elect the good judges.
Andrew Jackson

I guess you'd call me an independent, since I've never identified myself with one party or another in politics. I always decide my vote by taking as careful a look as I can at the actual candidates and issues themselves, no matter what the party label.
Jackie Robinson

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.
Richard M. Nixon

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
James A. Baldwin

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.
Mao Zedong

No, I think it taught me to be independent and never expect a handout and never wait for anybody to hand you anything in any aspect of my life.
Jesse James