“I had to take responsibility, even if it meant saying no to an authority figure, because I was the authority on me.”

“We defer to authority figures because they are supposed to know more than we do. If a mistake is made, it's easy to lay the blame at their feet. Ultimately, however, we are responsible for choosing the authority figure we defer to. Choosing to defer to one who urges aggression against others still puts the responsibility on us.”

“Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I'd be a politician.”

“Even years afterward I suffered from the tormenting fancy that the huge man, my father, the ultimate authority, would come almost for no reason at all and take me out of bed in the night and carry me out onto the pavlatche, and that consequently I meant absolutely nothing as far as he was concerned.”

“... I could not bank on the phlegmatic Chinese; I would have to take care of it myself. This would be safer and also consistent with my own responsibility. The latter is the anarch’s ultimate authority.”

“Find your true path. It’s so easy to become someone we don’t want to be, without even realizing it’s happening. We are created by the choices we make every day. And if we take action in order to please some authority figure, we’ll suddenly wake up down the road and say, “This isn’t me. I never wanted to be this person.”