Quotes About Individualism

The Beats' self-conception descended from a particular American lineage—mountain men, outlaws, frontier cranks, lonely individualists, and narcissistic outsiders sounding their barbaric yawps over the rooftops of the world. The hippie dream that followed drew as well from a parallel lineage—Cane Ridge, the communes of the 1830s and '40s, Transcendentalism, pastoralism, Thoreau. Both were enactments of classic American fantasies.

In America from the late 1960s on, equality came to mean not just that the law should treat everyone identically but that your beliefs about anything are equally as true as anyone else's. As the principle of absolute tolerance became axiomatic in our culture and internalized as part of our psychology—What I believe is true because I want and feel it to be true—individualism turned into rampant solipsism.

As we let a hundred dogmatic iterations of reality bloom, the eventual result was an anything-goes relativism that extends beyond religion to almost every kind of passionate belief: If I think it's true, no matter why or how I think it's true, then it's true, and nobody can tell me otherwise. That's the real-life reductio ad absurdum of American individualism. And it would become a credo of Fantasyland.

mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.

I know you don't approve of me or my ways, Ezra, but I got to make my way in this world the best I can. I got to work with what talents I got 'cause ain't nobody gonna look out for me but me. I will play my music, I will sing my songs, I will dance my dances. And sometimes, as I have found in my life, it's easier being a boy. That's the way of it. Till later, Ezra." I

QUINN; You always look after Number One, don't you? ASH; Doesn't everybody?

Let those who want to hatch hatch their own eggs. ----Martinique proverb

secondary or insufficiently individualistic to warrant merit.

Even crushed against his brother in the Tube the average Englishman pretends desperately that he is alone.

peoples, like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme of delicacy, or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure. Thus no matter how great the throng and press of their bodies, they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any two being able to agree since each follows his own pleasure and caprice.

Compreende-se por que, numa sociedade de indivíduos destinados à autonomia privada o atrativo do Novo é tão vivo: ele é sentido como instrumento de "liberação" pessoal, como experiência a ser tentada e vivida, pequena aventura do Eu.

Sometimes I wonder if it does exist such a thing called personality.

He renunciado desde hace tiempo a todas mis direcciones y paticipaciones industriales para comprarme la cosa más cara -en sentido económico y moral- del mundo: la libertad. Un lujo que no está al alcance hoy, ni siquiera de un simple millonario. Supongo que soy uno de los cinco o seis hombres apróximadamente libres que viven en la tierra.

He was not what he made up his mind to be. A man was the sum of his limits: freedom only made him see how much so. America was no America.

You save yourself. That's all. You save yourself, or you're damned.

We are in the midst of a struggle for American identity, including not only individualist liberalism and authoritarianism, but also the tradition of human rights and the common good that are under attack by an individualistic ideology of greed and selfishness. We need an American identity that supports fairness and justice so we have a way to encourage people to act with public responsibility.

We're giving our freedoms away. The American experiment was about freedom. Freedom to be stupid, freedom to fail, freedom to succeed.

What I'm trying to do is get this message out about self-empowerment, entrepreneurial spirit and true Americanism - the way we were when we changed the world, when Edison was alone, failing his 2 000th time on the lightbulb.

We should reject big government and look inside ourselves for all the things that built this country into what it was.

They recognized that they had little as compared to those in the top 10 percent, but they remained Republicans until their death, believing that freedom and self-initiative is the best for them and the country.

It just goes to show you that the "R" and the "D" are meaningless - what really matters is whether someone believes in the spirit and unending compassion of the individual, or instead in the destructive power of the collective.

If you're forcing and mandating people to act in a certain way, then it's not really "benevolence" or "charity"; it's effectively nothing more than tyranny, and tyranny never produces a well-functioning, happy society.

Democ'acy gives every man The right to be his own oppressor...

I'm afraid Mr. Everhard is right, he said. LAISSEZ-FAIRE, the let-alone policy of each for himself and devil take the hindmost. As Mr. Everhard said the other night, the function you churchmen perform is to maintain the established order of society, and society is established on that foundation. But that is not the teaching of Christ! cried the Bishop. The