Quotes About Individualism

So much for Western origin stories, which depict our forebears as ferocious, fearless, and free. Unbound by social commitments and merciless toward their enemies, they seem to have stepped straight out of your typical action movie. Present-day political thought keeps clinging to these macho myths, such as the belief that we can treat the planet any way we want, that humanity will be waging war forever, and that individual freedom takes precedence over community.

We believe that an individual must endeavor to assume the universalism inherent in the human condition.

More than ever, the "free market" turns neighbors into rivals and neighborhoods into covert battlegrounds.

Every man paddle his own canoe.

There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. While the first is the condition of a free society, the second means as DeTocqueville describes it, a new form of servitude.

I distrust all systematisers, and avoid them. The will to a system shows a lack of honesty.

Must someone, some unseen thing, declare what is right for it to be right? I believe that my own morality-which answers only to my heart-is more sure and true than the morality of those who do right only because they fear retribution.

If we understand how larger systems are contributing to our shame and we choose only to change ourselves, we become as negligent as the person who says, "I'm not changing myself, because the system is bad." Context is not the enemy of personal responsibility. Individualism is the enemy of personal responsibility.

At the same time sorting is on the rise, so is loneliness. According to Bishop, in 1976

September 4, 2019 0 Minutes Children, adolescents, adults and old people are in growing degree exposed to the contagious disease of loneliness in a world in which a competitive individualism tries to reconcile itself with a culture that speaks about togetherness, unity and community as the ideals to strive for.

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?

Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage. I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.

Men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men.

As for Doing-good...I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.

The thoughtful man becomes a hermit in the thoroughfares of the marketplace.

We are a race of tit-men...

Cold and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off.

Now-a-days, men wear a fool's cap, and call it a liberty cap.

I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. I am not the son of the engineer. I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to nature, it dies; and so a man.

Quanto ad adottare le soluzioni offerte dallo Stato per portare rimedio al male - io, quelle soluzioni, non le conosco: richiedono troppo tempo e un uomo morirebbe prima di riuscire a metterle in atto. Ho altre cose cui badare. Venni al mondo non principalmente per trasformarlo in un luogo buono dove vivere ma per vivervi, buono o cattivo che fosse. Un uomo non deve fare tutto, ma qualche cosa; e poiché tutto non lo può fare, non è necessario che faccia qualcosa di sbagliato.

Society is commonly too cheap.

As for adopting the ways which the State has provided for remedying the evil, I know not of such ways. They take too much time, and a man's life will be gone. I have other affairs to attend to. I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong.