Source: Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister
“Approval is overrated… Approval and disapproval alike satisfy those who deliver it more than those who receive it. I don't care for approval, and I don't mind doing without.”
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Gregory Maguire 87
Novelist 1954Related quotes
“Why do you want the approval of others who don't even approve of themselves?”
The Secret of Letting Go

“I try more and more to be myself, caring relatively little whether people approve or disapprove.”

Interview with Oprah Winfrey (2004), reported in Luke Henriques Gomes, " George Michael: from tortured star to pop icon http://thenewdaily.com.au/entertainment/music/2016/12/26/george-michael-bathroom-incident/", The New Daily (December 26, 2016).

America's Drug Forum interview (1991)
Context: It's a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don't approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else. Most of the arrests for drugs are for possession by casual users.
Now here's somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If he's caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think it's absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be our government, should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail. That's the issue to me. The economic issue comes in only for explaining why it has those effects. But the economic reasons are not the reasons.

Vyjayanthimala still cuts a striking figure tall

“I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life.”
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Variant: Surprizes are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.
Source: Emma (1815)

Said of Benito Mussolini while comparing him to Hildebrand (i. e. Pope Gregory VII), as quoted in "The Pearl of Great Price" by Robert Royal, his Introduction to "The Resurrection of Rome" by G. K. Chesterton in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton (1990) by Vol. XXI, p. 274