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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My mother was determined to make us independent. When I was four years old, she stopped the car a few miles from our house and made me find my own way home across the fields. I got hopelessly lost.
Richard Branson

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

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

Anyone who thinks that the vice-president can take a position independent of the president of his administration simply has no knowledge of politics or government. You are his choice in a political marriage, and he expects your absolute loyalty.
Hubert H. Humphrey