Quotes About Individualism

I'm afraid that all my life I shall be an unpolitical = asocial painter, a so-called individualist depicting lemons, writing fairy tales, collecting weird objects as a hobby and detesting associations and societies. It seems rather silly, but that's the way I want my life. And if I fight, it's only so as to find peace,' she wrote in February 1949.

there is something so personal about penmanship, especially hers, the purity and consistency in her cursive, the beauty and the lost art and the individualism

If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation.

The democratic age mourns the value of human beings.

It's just what Wendell Phillips said," she declared. "' The Puritan's idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.

Cynical, hell. I'm a healthy old man with a constitutional mistrust of paternalism and government in large doses.

If you did not want much, there was plenty. Keeping a nigger happy these days is like catering to a king. In New York you are your own person. You may reach out and embrace all of Manhattan in sweet aloneness, or you can go to hell if you want to.

The only thing in America that is still unique in this tired world is that a man can go as far as his brains will take him or he can go to hell if he wants to

The only thing in America that is still unique in this tired world is that a man can go as far as his brains will take him or he can go to hell if he wants to, but it won't be that way much longer.

I went to sleep with the tape player whispering softly in my ears such ego-building epigrams as, 'You are better than everyone else and you know it, and people who don't know it had better watch out,' and 'They are all fools and if you were in charge things would be different, and why aren't you in charge, it's easy enough.

We are Citizens of the Outside. We have rejected the simplistic, boring, regimented, bureaucratic, moral, and ethical scriptures by which they live. In their place we have substituted our own far superior ones. We may physically move among them—but we are not of them. Where they are lazy, we are industrious. Where they are immoral, we are moral. Where they are liars, we are the Truth. We are probably the greatest power for good to the society that we have discarded.

Every person should decide for himself how happy, or unhappy, our society might be.

We're talking about people, not common denominators.

No, even I know better than that. I'm looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness.

My own mind is my own church."43

this sort of, arrogant individualism which imagines each new generation can somehow create the world afresh.

Since the end of WWII, France's steady movement away from Western ideas of individual liberty and self-determination - and toward collectivist action and conformance - has created a people overly dependent on government, hobbled by crippling taxes and lacking in individual initiative.

When you're reading Thoreau you look at Hollywood differently, let me tell ya!

Ask me not, 'Are you rightwing,' but ask me 'Are you a committed believer in individual freedom, the values of the enlightenment?' Then, yeah, if being rightwing means believing Adam Smith was right, both in the 'Wealth of Nations' and the 'Theory of Moral Sentiments,' then I'm rightwing.

One of the many American ideals that make no sense at all is that we're all a million rugged individualists marching in lockstep. We dress accordingly, at least the men. If it's always been thus, I yearn for the halcyon days of the man in the gray flannel suit because at least that guy had some flair.

I never was in the Nation of Islam... I mean, what I call myself is a natural Muslim, 'cause it's just me and God. You know, going to the mosque, the ritual and the tradition, it's just not in me to do. So I don't do it.

The philosophy of individualism owes a great deal to the tradition of novel-writing and novel-reading. In its development and in its aesthetics, the novel is not politically neutral; it has been a participant in history all along.

America glories in its tradition of the self-made individual. Political candidates compete to be a friend to entrepreneurs, and policymakers, imagining the next Microsoft or Google, design laws to back the innovator in the garage.

No other teammates can help you when you're on the ice by yourself against the clock. So I decided that if I'm going to race on my own, I'm going to train on my own.