Quotes About Individualism

One of the guiding beliefs of our consuming age is that we are all free and independent individuals. That we can choose to do pretty much what we want, and if we can't, then it's bad. But at the same time, co-existing alongside this, there is a completely different, parallel universe where we all seem meekly to do what those in power tell us to do.

In London, people can be so... well, it's not even a case of people being unkind or unfriendly. You just don't make any contact in London. You go from A to B with your eyes on the pavement.

The emancipation of women is practically the greatest egoistic movement of the nineteenth century, and the most intense affirmation of the right of the self that history has yet seen.

It is morally obscene to regard wealth as an anonymous, tribal product and to talk about 'redistributing' it.

The happiness of man is: I will. The happiness of woman is: he wills.

The best belongs to me and mine; and if we are not given it, we take it: the best food, the purest sky, the most robust thoughts, the fairest women!

My way of thinking is better than yours.

I do not believe there is any important difference between men and women - certainly not as much as they may be between one woman and another or one man and another.

Rule #1 always look out for yourself first don't nobody love/care for you like you do.

I'm a piece of work, man. I will do what I want, at all times, always. Nobody's going to persuade me one way or another. I can't be persuaded. I take criticism, I listen, I analyze, but at the end of the day, I make the decisions. Because that's the way I started, and that's the way I'm going to finish.

I would consider myself a rather staunch libertarian.

Nobody is accidentally in Alaska. The people who are in Alaska are there because they choose to be, so they've sort of got a real frontier ethic. The people are incredibly friendly, interesting, smart people - but they also stay out of each other's business.

I don't mind staying in one place for a while - I like to spend a lot of time in Los Angeles. It's a place where nobody goes out, where people will leave you alone. People in Los Angeles love themselves and they love what they do and they leave you alone. If you're isolated, you have a real advantage. You can work.

If it is wrong for you to take money from someone else who earned it, to take their money by force for your own needs, then it is certainly just as wrong for you to demand that the government step forward and do this dirty work for you.

As an inhabitant of a Mississippi River town happily shouts out in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , "You pays your money and you makes your choice!" That may be the most American sentence ever written.

As Ludwig von Mises puts it in this seminal book, modern man "must free himself from the habit, just as soon as something does not please him, of calling for the police.

And although they like to fancy themselves rugged individualists (better yet, the last of the rugged individualists), what they really are is a personality type that our society generates so predictably and in such great numbers that they almost constitute a viable market segment all on their own. One more thing about the backlash personality type: every single one of the bitter self-made men of my youth was a believer in the power of positive thinking.

The swaggering personal habits of the bitter self-made men only confirmed my adolescent understanding of the social order. Riding a BMW motorcycle without a helmet, taking no shit from the police, drinking Wild Turkey at all hours of the day, carrying a .45 automatic tucked into their waistband—if that wasn't working class, what was?

The right of nature... is the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature that is to say, of his own life.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

Mind thine own concerns.

Propria mea minte este biserica mea.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All

I devote Chapter 5 to the issue of a 'chastened individualism', as the existentialists try to conceive of social solidarity in a manner that will enhance rather than compromise individual freedom and responsibility, which remain non-negotiable.