A Quote by Tara Westover

I felt like I needed to come to terms with the decision I'd made to let go of my family. What do you do when you want to be loyal to your family but you feel that loyalty to them is in conflict somehow with loyalty to yourself?
I felt like we had stories about family loyalty; I didn't feel like we had stories about what to do when you felt that loyalty to your family was in conflict with loyalty to yourself.
If loyalty is, and always has been, perceived as obsolete, why do we continue to praise it? Because loyalty is essential to the most basic things that make life livable. Without loyalty there can be no love. Without loyalty there can be no family. Without loyalty there can be no friendship. Without loyalty there can be no commitment to community or country. And without those things, there can be no society.
We are a family, and the loyalty of the family must come before anything and everyone else. For if we honor that commitment, we will never be vanquished-but if we falter in that loyalty we will all be condemned.
When we are debating an issue, loyalty means giving me your honest opinion, whether you think I'll like it or not. Disagreement, at this state, stimulates me. But once a decision is made, the debate ends. From that point on, loyalty means executing the decision as if it were your own.
Loyalty to the family must be merged into loyalty to the community, loyalty to the community into loyalty to the nation, and loyalty to the nation into loyalty to mankind. The citizen of the future must be a citizen of the world.
Loyalty, Signor Molteni, not love. Penelope is loyal to Ulysses but we do not know how far she loved him...and as you know people can sometimes be absolutely loyal without loving. In certain cases, in fact, loyalty is form of vengeance, of black-mail, of recovering one's self-respect. Loyalty, not love.
I grew up in a home in which loyalty to family was central to my father's outlook. Adolescent changes to my outlook (which set me against parental values) made me very critical of loyalty, reinforced by certain religious writers I found influential at that time. Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind. But I remained conflicted about loyalty.
I think when things get hard with your family, it's really easy to want to isolate yourself. The world is so harsh, so when stuff happens outside, you want to go to your family, but when stuff happens inside your family, you sort of start to feel like, 'I'm alone. There is no place I can go to where just nothing will happen to me.'
You start to stress yourself out about the people around you. You start to think, like, "What do you really want from me?" And then you forget that you, at some point, asked them for something. At some point you needed them to take you in because you ain't had nowhere to go. And now you turn around and question their loyalty to you, and those were the only people loyal to you. The only people that really loved you are still there, and you tanked on them. I'll never let that happen.
If there were things I felt the White House needed to be doing differently, I'd probably call them. I have a saying, and I had this in Michigan as chair, which is, 'We're a family.' When you have a difference of opinion in your family, you don't go on 'Jerry Springer'; you pick up the phone, and you call your family member.
What is patriotism but love of the good things we ate in our childhood? I have said elsewhere that the loyalty to Uncle Sam is the loyalty to doughnuts and ham and sweet potatoes and the loyalty to the German Vaterland is the loyalty to Pfannkuchen and Christmas Stollen. As for international understanding, I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini... in food, as in death, we feel the essential brotherhood of mankind.
I feel like in the NFL, they preach loyalty and family and they have none for you. As a player, you see it's not a family during negotiations, how it becomes them versus me or me versus them. That's part of the NFL I believe the fans don't see.
Forget loyalty. Or at least loyalty to one's corporation. Try loyalty to your Rolodex-your network-instead.
The primary rule of business success is loyalty to your employer. That's all right as a theory. What is the matter with loyalty to yourself?
If you don't connect yourself to your family and to the world in some fashion, through your job or whatever it is you do, you feel like you're disappearing, you feel like you're fading away, you know? I felt like that for a very very long time. Growing up, I felt like that a lot. I was just invisible; an invisible person. I think that feeling, wherever it appears, and I grew up around people who felt that way, it's an enormous source of pain; the struggle to make yourself felt and visible. To have some impact, and to create meaning for yourself, and for the people you come in touch with.
Loyalty is a word which has worked vast harm; for it has been made to trick men into being "loyal" to a thousand iniquities, whereas the true loyalty should have been to themselves - in which case there would have ensured a rebellion, and the throwing off of that deceptive yoke.
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