Quotes About Individualism

I do not concern myself with gods and spirits either good or evil nor do I serve any.

There were precious few people you could trust, so if you wanted to survive, you'd better always look out for Number One.

Libertarian is someone who says, 'you can be as liberal or conservative as you want to be, just don't force others to be like you.

When you're not playing up to your capability, you gotta try everything, to motivate, to get them going. All of them have to be on the same end of the rope to pull together. It's playing for the name on the front of the shirt, not the back. Individualism gets you trophies and plaques. Play for the front, that wins championships. I try to remind them of that.

but I am the sort of person who does not seem to need the day-to-day emotional support provided by normal civilized social contact.

These beings have no other profession than to cultivate the idea of beauty in their person, to satisfy their passions, to feel and to think.

I wasn't a misanthrope and I wasn't a misogynist but I liked being alone. It felt good to sit alone in a small space and smoke and drink. I had always been good company for myself.

Do you hate people?" "I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around.

In the state of nature...all men are born equal, but they cannot continue in this equality. Society makes them lose it, and they recover it only by the protection of the law.

Now you see, Tom," said Mr. Harthouse (...); "every man is selfish in everything he does, and I am exactly like the rest of my fellow-creatures.

Oh self, self, self! At every turn nothing but self!

So, Mr. Bounderby threw on his hat—he always threw it on, as expressing a man who had been far too busily employed in making himself, to acquire any fashion of wearing his hat—and with his hands in his pockets, sauntered out into the hall. 'I never wear gloves,' it was his custom to say. 'I didn't climb up the ladder in them.—Shouldn't be so high up, if I had.' Being

No one should suffer from the great delusion that any form of communism or socialism which promotes the dictatorship of the few instead of the initiative of the millions can produce a happier or more prosperous society.

The American Indian was an individualist in religion as in war. He had neither a national army nor an organized church.

it has always been a premise that compelled belief is not true faith, that man can come to salvation only if he comes freely, and therefore, in the end, that a man is responsible for his own soul. This element, of course, becomes central in Protestant theology, which emphasizes each individual's personal and unmediated relationship to God. The individual's capacity and therefore right to judge both truth and goodness was a premise of the Enlightenment.

So too the growth of modern science depended on the premise of the individual's ability to judge evidence and argument for himself, free from the authority— though not the argument and evidence—of tradition.

Allowing people the freedom to pursue their own interests (within the limits of just conduct) is the best and only sustainable way to achieve societal progress. For individuals to develop and have a chance at happiness, they must be free to make their own choices and mistakes, rather than be forced to accept choices made for them by others.

The possibility of men living together in peace and to their mutual advantage, without having to agree on common concrete aims, and bound only by abstract rules of conduct, was perhaps the greatest discovery mankind ever made.

If Ayn Rand were an up-and-coming author today, she wouldn't write about steel or railroads, it would be net neutrality.

For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be.

Man makes himself, and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he desacralizes himself and the world. The sacred is the prime obstacle to his freedom. He will become himself only when he is totally demysticized. He will not be truly free until he has killed the last god.

Having been born into a large litter and raised, as one republican put it, in a shared New World household, Spanish American nations were socialized at an early age. The United States, in contrast, was created lonely and raised thinking it was one of a kind.

John Murray wrote: The least of God's commandments, if they bind us, bind others. We must resist the virulent poison of individualism which tolerates in others the indifference and disobedience which we cannot justify in ourselves…. The moment we become complacent to the sins of others then we have begun to relax our own grip on the sanctity of the commandments of God, and we are on the way to condoning the same sin in ourselves

Look, the center right coalition in American politics today is best understood as a coalition of groups and individuals that on the issue that brings them to politics what they want from the government is to be left alone.