Quotes About Individualism

ever since, he's found the corporate lifestyle so stultifying and soul-destroying, he dreams of living in a wigwam in a field of growing his own food

Rejoicing in his absolute authority, the single egoist will exploit it methodically, whereas a mêlée of egoists will bring about a ruinous disorder and a disastrous cleavage, because the contrariety of the appetites to be satisfied will prevent the satisfaction of any single one. Clearly, then, the effect of the pursuit of private ends under cover of the public good will be worse if there are many with a hand in power than if there is only one.

I've never been drawn to the feminist movement. I've never been put down by a man, unless I deserved it, and have never felt inferior.

I don't share blame. I don't share credit. And I don't share desserts.

But what keeps throwing us back is so much backbiting and gossiping and lying going on; even among the counterculture everybody either wants to be worshipped or be king of the hill. I'm seriously beginning to question whether I've met an honest person in my life.

For too long in this society, we have celebrated unrestrained individualism over common community. For too long as a nation, we have been lulled by the anthem of self-interest. For a decade, led by Ronald Reagan, self-aggrandizement has been the full-throated cry of this society: 'I've got mine, so why don't you get yours' and 'What's in it for me?'

only in relatively recent times have people decided that "because I want to" is sufficient reason for annoying others. Only in a culture of hyperindividualism would it occur to you to do what you wanted without reference to anyone else—

It's the easiest thing in the world to say, 'Every broad for herself.' Saying it and acting that way is one thing that's kept some of us behind the eight ball where we've been living for a hundred years.

The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy.

If you're a misanthrope you stay at home. There are certain writers who really don't like other people. I'm not like that, I don't think.

Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.

Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn't that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire?

Contact with the world, with which I have been steadily rubbing shoulders now for fourteen months, makes me feel more and more like returning to my shell. I hate the crowd, the herd. It seems to me always atrociously stupid or vile.

My God is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, of Voltaire, of Beranger! My credo is the credo of Rousseau!

The spectacle thus unites what is separate, but it unites it only in its separateness.

the pretensions of anarchism in its individualist variants have always been laughable

Sometimes I feel entirely disassociated from what I do. It's a malady of the modern age.

What's the point of knocking yourself out for anybody but yourself? The answer was obvious. There wasn't any.

Paterson was not a member of the club. [..] When Paterson wanted to swim he took a towel and swam in the river naked and his Burmese boy stood on the bank with his bath-robe and waited to rub him down. 'I like to swim in water, not people,' was a remark of Paterson's that for a long time went round the club.

The American moron's mind simply does not run in that direction; he wants to keep his Ford, even at the cost of losing the Bill of Rights

One man who minds his own business is more valuable to the world than 10,000 cocksure moralists.

Western farmers were individualists cheifly in their dreams.

But Bjartur wanted it to appear that his hospitality was a very minor issue. "The chief point," he said, "and the point towards which I have always directed my course, is independence. And a man is always independent if the hut he lives in is his own. Whether he lives or dies is his concern, and his only. Otherwise, I maintain, one cannot be independent. This desire for freedom runs in a man's blood, as anybody who has been servant to another understands.

In both instances, men have become entirely private, that is, they have been deprived of seeing and hearing others, of being seen and being heard by them. They are all imprisoned in the subjectivity of their own singular experience, which does not cease to be singular if the same experience is multiplied innumerable times. The end of the common world has come when it is seen only under one aspect and is permitted to present itself in only one perspective.