Quotes About Individualism

Everyone has got their own ideas and they push them and say to hell with everyone else. That's the history of the human race. It got us on top, only now it is pushing us off. The thing is that people will put up with any kind of discomfort, and dying babies, and old age at thirty as long as it has always been that way. Try to get them to change and they fight you, even while they're dying, saying it was good enough for grandpa so it's good enough for me. Bango, dead.

Everybody wants something at the expense of everybody else and nobody thinks much of the other fellow.

Team sports aren't my thing. I find it easier to pick something up if I can do it at my own speed. And you don't need a partner to go running, you don't need a particular place, like in tennis, just a pair of trainers.

You can depend on no man, on no friend, but him who can depend on himself.

man becomes a little cog in the machine, and, aware of this, his one preoccupation is to become a bigger cog. —Max Weber,

What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.

If you want to move beyond hive-docility, you must become God the Moralist.

Book writing, like any good work, demonstrates that our myths about individualism are untrue. All work worth doing is necessarily dependent upon the work, goodwill, support, and kindnesses of others.

for recent sociologists the dark secret at the heart of modern individualism is its failure as a mode of life...

Satan greets people in hell by saying: "You'll find that there's no right or wrong here—just what works for you.

Hidden beneath localism's DIY attitude is a deep pessimism: it assumes we can't make large-scale, collective social change," worries Sharzer.

People searching for a new relationship with nature and a set of spiritual values to counter the individualism, political economy and environmental impact of modern industrial society latched on to the image of the Ecological Indian.

Not for nothing was Smith's first book about moral philosophy. His concern, as Foley says, was the one that has haunted economic thinking ever since: "how to be a good person and live a good and moral life within the antagonistic, impersonal, and self-regarding social relations that capitalism imposes.

This restless searching is what's behind the 'me–first' attitude that has characterized recent decades, and it's affecting everyone, from Wall Street to street gangs." She

Ich bin nur entschlossen, im Interesse meines Glückes zu handeln, ohne Rücksicht auf Sie oder irgendjemanden, der ebenso wenig mit mir zu tun hat.

At any rate, it is safer to leave people to their own devices on such subjects. Everybody likes to go their own way—to choose their own time and manner of devotion

Do you think I would want to live under a government that you ran or set up? It's all very nice to say you're an anarchist, but you only want anarchy for yourself. For the rest of us, you want to make sure we do what you say, think how you think, and remember you're the boss.

We Anglophones have reasons for adopting strange diets. Increasingly, we live alone. We have an unprecedented choice of foods, and we're not sure what's in them or whether they're good for us. And we expect to customize practically everything: parenting, news, medicines, even our own faces.

The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.

There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.

It's a Gen X thing to be okay with going unnoticed or unrated or untouched. To be free from strangers' expectations, or anger. People got angry at me when I stopped making music because it seemed I was devaluing everything.

The U.S. is such an unusual place in the world because you can believe anything you want.

Every tax or rate, forcibly taken from an unwilling person, is immoral and oppressive.

Americans being upright and forthright and honest and true to themselves is a very hard concept.