Quotes About Individualism

In spite of Jean-Jacques and his school, men are not everywhere born free, any more than they are everywhere in chains, unless these be of their own individual making.

When man, Apollo man, rockets into space, it isn't in order to find his brother, I'm quite sure of that. It's to confirm that he hasn't any brothers.

Every god-man created his own god: and there is no worse enmity on earth than that between gods.

When did it become something of shame or ridicule to be a self-made man in America?

I never agree with Communists or any other kind of kept men.

Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.

The preservation of individualism—of either type—has historically required the suppression of less privileged voices. The unacknowledged social underpinning of both forms of individualism is caste, privilege, and exclusivity.

The whole of society pivots around that force which man has come to uphold as his principal deity - egotism. Under the influence of this jealous deity, man is forced to perceive the world around him only in terms of gross separativeness; his prevailing thoughts ever centred upon the theme of 'i here, and the world out there'.

The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.

He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.

In many people it is already an impertinence to say "I".

What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.

Among today's adept practitioners, the lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion. The lie, once a liberal means of communication, has today become one of the techniques of insolence enabling each individual to spread around him the glacial atmosphere in whose shelter he can thrive.

Life is conceived as a vast supermarket through which one moves with one's shopping trolley, fetching down ways of life from shelves marked "Existential choices.

When you are harried, browbeaten, cajoled, bullied, pursued, threatened, bribed and surveyed by the state and its agencies, you have little inclination left over for obedience: least of all obedience to what one judge called the unenforceable. You have already paid your dues to society. Society can now look after itself. In the small sphere left to you, you will do exactly what you please, without regard to anyone else.

Flea markets are also now legal in Cuba, and a petty trade in cast-off clothing and household goods takes place. Twelve years ago it was unthinkable for anyone to buy or sell anything in the open, for buying and selling were symptoms of bourgeois individualism and contrary to Fidel's socialist vision, in which everything is to be rationed—rationally, as it were—according to need. (In practice, of course, this meant rationing according to what there was, which was not much.)

I am a strong individualist by personal habit, inheritance, and conviction; but it is a mere matter of common sense to recognize that the State, the community, the citizens acting together, can do a number of things better than if they were left to individual action.

The reader, the booklover, must meet his own needs without paying too much attention to what his neighbors say those needs should be.

The Renaissance… was based on a new idea of the importance of the individual. But this was a fragile foundation, because individuals depended on constant applause and admiration to sustain them. There is a shortage of applause in the world, and there is not enough respect to go around.

Let me have my own way in exactly everything and a sunnier and pleasanter creature does not exist.

Most of all, he would have been alienated by America's determined, self-centered individualism

Such security is equal liberty. But it is not necessarily equality in the use of the earth.

I have never experienced any nepotism or groupism in my career.

Columbus did not seek a new route to the Indies in response to a majority directive.