outside influences Quotes

“Then if you want something and it’s a good thing and you got it in the right way, you better hang on to it and don’t let nobody talk you out of it. You care what a lot of useless people say ‘bout you you’ll never get anywhere, ‘cause there’s a lotta folks don’t want you to make it. You understand what I’m telling you?”

“The expectations that others place on us help us form our expectations of ourselves.”

“We will do what others expect of us . . . If they expect us to graduate, we will graduate. If they expect us to get a job, we will get a job. lf they expect us to go to jail, then that’s where we will end up too. At some point you lose control.”

“For if we truly believed in an internal light, we would not believe in the power of external forces, and we would not be so easy to dominate and control. We would not be tempted to see hair and clothes and makeup as sources of so much of our self-esteem and the ideal beauty of a fashion model as a sign that we are not beautiful at all.”

“Give me the boy: I am glad you did not nurse him: Though he does bear some signs of me, yet you Have too much blood in him.”

“It all goes back and back. To our mothers and fathers and theirs before them. We are puppets dancing on the strings of those who came before us, and one day our own children will take up our strings and dance on in our steads.”

“Girls are from the earliest infancy fond of dress. Not content with being pretty, they are desirous of being thought so.”

“Civilized women are, therefore, so weakened by false refinement, that, respecting morals, their condition is much below what it would be were they left in a state nearer to nature.”

“A person whose desires and impulses are his own- are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture- is said to have character.”

“Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere.”

“Researchers find that whatever a family does do to influence a child’s personality, it affects each child differently, as if each is growing up in a completely different family.”

“Don’t let them make anything of you but yourself, that’s all.”