Quotes About Individualism

Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; and on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of individualism and personal experience that makes cooperation impossible

Liberty demands self-government, but not the right to interfere with others.

The romantic movement, in art, in literature, and in politics, is bond up with this subjective way of judging men, not as members of a community, but as aesthetically delightful objects of contemplation. Tigers are more beautiful than sheep, but we prefer them behind bars. The typical romantic removes the bars and enjoys the magnificent leaps with which the tiger annihilates the sheep. He exhorts men to imagine themselves tigers, and when he succeeds the results are not wholly pleasant.

The decay of the family in quite recent times is undoubtedly to be attributed in the main to the industrial revolution, but it had already begun before that event, and its beginnings were inspired by individualistic theory. Young

Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers, ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes co-operation impossible.

I have spoken hitherto of those who command and those who obey, but there is a third type, namely, those who withdraw. There are men who have the courage to refuse submission without having the imperiousness that causes the wish to command. Such men do not fit readily into the social structure, and in one way or another they seek a refuge where they can enjoy a more or less solitary freedom.

Education, and the life of the mind generally, is a matter in which individual initiative is the chief thing needed; the function of the state should begin and end with insistence on some kind of education, and, if possible, a kind which promotes mental individualism, not a kind which happens to conform to the prejudices of government officials.

We cannot admire a social system which allows no scope for individual achievement, and we cannot approve one in which excessive individualism makes the social system unstable.

But history is perhaps an even better antidote to anarchic individualism as well as to a lifeless traditionalism

Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.

I resent the fact that people in places like Boston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco believe that they should be able to tell us how to live our lives, operate our businesses, and what to do with the land that we love and cherish.

I'm quite a shy person, and I dislike narcissism intensely.

As an American, you can do whatever you want to do, and you can choose whatever side you want to be on.

When we drug ourselves to blot out our soul's call, we are being good Americans and exemplary consumers.

Rooster was a bad slave. He had no use for anyone, not even the gods. Not that he was angry at the gods, like some I'd met. He just dismissed them entirely. There were no gods, and that was that.

solitary golfers struck him as a squirrelly, self-involved breed, like hermits or fly fishermen.

But we Americans scrap relationships that are not working as we would like -- whether they be with relatives, with spouses, or with friends. We dispose of them like Kleenex. When it is inconvenient, painful, difficult, I get rid of you. I hit the road.

After all, what is ''a man'' nowadays? Somebody who stands alone, independent of all ties.

The early Romantic sought superiority by desiring, and by desiring to desire, more intensely than others do.

In the early nineteenth century, a new culture—a new idea about what to hope for—emerged for many Americans, centered around the independent self, under nation and God.

El capitalismo no es un mero sistema económico, sino que posee una visión totalizadora y articulada del hombre, una antropología corrosiva que se funda no sólo en la liberalización del consumo, sino también de las costumbres

Wir sind nicht einmal in der Lage, eine Familie zu gründen, geschweige denn, uns mit einer Partei zu identifizieren! [...] Wir wollen keine Gemeinschaft. Wir wollen unsere Ruhe.

een maatschappij waarin het er alleen nog om ging om tijdens de grote uitverkoop van waarden en normen de eigen schaapjes op het droge te krijgen.

Seguramente Nietzsche pensaba en su hermana cuando teorizó sobre el superhombre.