“You cannot learn what you are made of if you rely on anyone or anything else to help you.”

Source: Sugar Daddy

"In Exile, Free Speech at Last in The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1997/11/22/in-exile-free-speech-at-last/4591c34b-12c4-4a86-be28-261f6a260b8d/ (22 November 1997)

An abbreviated version of a quote by California politician Dianne Feinstein, from an interview with Cosmopolitan magazine in October 1985 https://books.google.com/books?id=zmxNAQAAIAAJ&dq=You+have+to+learn+the+rules+of+the+game+and+then+you+have+to+play+better+than+anyone+else&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=%22rules+of+the+game%22, on the topic of women running for public office. The original was: "... I really do have staying power. That's important for women who run for office. When you get in there and push for a lot of new things all at once and don't get them, you don't just leave. You have to commit, be a team player, learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play it better than anyone else."
Misattributed

Source: Summerhill (1960), p. 12
Context: You cannot make children learn music or anything else without to some degree converting them into will-less adults. You fashion them into accepters of the status quo – a good thing for a society that needs obedient sitters at dreary desks, standers in shops, mechanical catchers of the 8:30 suburban train – a society, in short, that is carried on the shabby shoulders of the scared little man – the scared-to-death conformist.

Introduction, p. 24
Thinking and Destiny (1946)

Managing, Chapter One (Theory G on Management), p. 13.

Context: Grace Jones said this to me when I met her. I washed her feet, and I looked up at her and she said, "No matter what you do in your life, don’t you ever let anybody take your creative people away from you." And what my creative friends always remind me of is they say, "Only value the opinion of those that you respect. And anyone that you don’t respect, pay no mind to their opinion about you or anything else." And that’s how I live my life. If I worried about everything that everyone said, I would not be a good artist.

Address to Polaroid employees at Symphony Hall in Boston, Massachusetts (5 February 1960), as quoted in Insisting on the Impossible : The Life of Edwin Land (1998) by Victor K. McElheny, p. 198
Context: The world is a scene changing so rapidly that it takes every bit of intuitive ability you have, every brain cell each one of you has, to make the sensible decision about what to do next. You cannot rely upon what you have been taught. All you have learned from history is old ways of making mistakes. There is nothing that history can tell you about what we must do tomorrow. Only what we must not do.

Source: The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Ch. XXIII.