C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Independence
Independence now and independency forever.
Independence, like honor, is a rocky island, without a beach.
For my own private satisfaction, I had rather be master of my own time than wear a diadem.
To be truly and really independent is to support ourselves by our own exertions.
Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one’s self?
The king is the least independent man in his dominions; the beggar the most so.
All we ask is to be let alone.
It is not the greatness of a man’s means that makes him independent, so much as the smallness of his wants.
I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than to be crowded on a velvet cushion.
The man is best served who has no occasion to put the hands of others at the end of his own arms.
Let Fortune do her worst, whatever she makes us lose, as long as she never makes us lose our honesty and our independence.
The greatest of all human benefits, that at least without which no other benefit can be truly enjoyed, is independence.
I never thrust my nose into other men’s porridge. It is no bread and butter of mine: Every man for himself and God for us all.
These two things, contradictory as they may seem, must go together,—manly dependence and manly independence, manly reliance and manly self-reliance.
The word “independence” is united to the accessory ideas of dignity and virtue. The word “dependence” is united to the ideas of inferiority and corruption.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.