We are free till we make choices. After that, the choice controls us and we have no more choice.

When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.

We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.

We’re left without a chance, ignorant and remorseful among the ruins of our ambitions.

To say you have no choice is to relieve yourself of responsibility.

When you can’t control time, your job, or five days of your life each week, you feel powerless. Emotions of helplessness create an environment ripe for instant gratification and consumption-driven Lifestyle Servitude.

The ability to choose cannot be taken away or even given away — it can only be forgotten.

When we forget our ability to choose, we learn to be helpless. Drip by drip we allow our power to be taken away until we end up becoming a function of other people’s choices — or even a function of our own past choices. In turn, we surrender our power to choose. That is the path of the Nonessentialist. The Essentialist doesn’t just recognize the power of choice, he celebrates it. The Essentialist knows that when we surrender our right to choose, we give others not just the power but also the explicit permission to choose for us.

When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free.

Learning too soon our limitations, we never learn our powers.

The idea of choice is easily debased if one forgets that the aim is to have chosen successfully, not to be endlessly choosing.

Psychologists call it “learned helplessness” when a person believes, as I did during my youth, that the choices I made had no effect on the outcomes in my life.

Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love.

We all start as strangers, but we forget that we rarely choose who ends up a stranger, too