Quotes About Individual

Michael, if he wants an operation on his nose, plastic surgery, hey, he can do it. It's his right.

He explained civilization to me. I mean how it looks to him. He's going to let it go on a little while longer. But it better be careful and not interfere with his private life. If it does, he's apt to make a phone call to God and cancel the order.

One view is that privacy consists of 'limited accessibility' – a cluster of three related but independent components: secrecy: information known about an individual; anonymity: attention paid to an individual; and solitude: physical access to an individual.

The manner in which information is collected, stored, exchanged, and used has changed forever – and with it, the character of the threats to individual privacy. But while the electronic revolution touches almost every part of our lives, it is not, of course, technology itself that is the villain, but the uses to which it is put.

Participation in the collective life of the polis both restrains the extraordinary individual and enlarges the ordinary individual, allowing him to participate in the extraordinary. An individual can achieve participatory excellence via the accomplishments of the polis and need not always be caught up in the agnostic struggle to outdo his peers.

There's a public equivalent to private depression, a sense that the nation or the society rather than the individual is stuck. Things don't always change for the better, but they change, and we can play a role in that change if we act. Which is where hope comes in, and memory, the collective memory we call history.

You are not just a consumer. You are a citizen of this Earth and your responsibility is not private but public, not individual but social.

The conversation changed. The term "rape culture" started to circulate widely. It insists that a wider culture generates individual crimes and that both must be addressed—and can be.

As we discovered during Prohibition, the good the government does by reducing drug use must be weighed against the harm done in supporting the criminal underground that serves this black market, not to mention the loss of individual freedom caused by the state imposing its group morality on everyone.

The currency used in the casino of evolution is survival, strictly gene survival, but for many purposes individual survival is a reasonable approximation.

It will be remembered that the 'central theorem' of the selfish organism claims that an animal's behaviour tends to maximize its own (inclusive) fitness. We saw that to talk of an individual behaving so as to maximize its inclusive fitness is equivalent to talking of the gene or genes 'for' that behaviour pattern maximizing their survival.

Religion can endanger the life of the pious individual, as well as the lives of others.

The controversy about group selection versus individual selection is a controversy about the rival claims of two suggested kinds of vehicle.

The controversy about gene selection versus individual (or group) selection is a controversy about whether, when we talk about a unit of selection, we ought to mean a vehicle at all, or a replicator.

Each individual goes on for an unpredictable time. Unpredictable on any particular occasion, that is, but averaging the true value of the resource

The right to be Christian' seems in this case to mean 'the right to poke your nose into other people's private lives.

the behaviour of an individual may not always be interpretable as designed to maximize its own genetic welfare: it may be maximizing somebody else's genetic welfare, in this case that of a parasite inside it.

These are claims that could have been made for Lorenz's On Aggression, Ardrey's The Social Contract, and Eibl-Eibesfeldt's Love and Hate. The trouble with these books is that their authors got it totally and utterly wrong. They got it wrong because they misunderstood how evolution works. They made the erroneous assumption that the important thing in evolution is the good of the species (or the group) rather than the good of the individual (or the gene).

One man's feeling is not always equal to all life is. Sometimes it's not equal to anything much at all.

No hay necesidad de tocar, besar, abrazar. Pero lo hago de todos modos. Es nuestro último fetiche. El amor no es otra cosa al fin y al cabo, que una interminable serie de actos individuales.

The causes of human deficiencies in intelligence—or parenting, or social behavior, or work behavior—lay outside the individual. They were caused by flaws in society.

That's right. People. It's all people. People and their stupid fucking groups. Show me an individual decision maker whose decisions have harmed me, and I'll melt his stack to slag. Show me a group with the united purpose of harming me and I'll take them all down if I can. But don't expect me to waste time and effort on abstract hate.

My philosopher friend, who gazed on life and decided that any responsible, thinking individual should have the right to reject this gift that had never been asked for—and whose noble gesture reemphasised with each passing decade the compromise and littleness that most lives consist of. 'Most lives': my life.

We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated. Or we blame a historical process as a way of exonerating individuals.