Quotes About Individualism

I'll put my faith in individuals, not the collective.

The nice thing about egotists is that they don't talk about other people.

The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state.

The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion.

Since nobody is in a position to substitute his own value judgments for those of the acting individual, it is vain to pass judgment on other people's aims and volitions. No man is qualified to declare what would make another man happier or less discontented.

A free man must be able to endure it when his fellow men act and live otherwise than he considers proper. He must free himself from the habit, just as soon as something does not please him, of calling for the police.

If one rejects laissez faire on account of mans fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action.

It is not from a disdain of spiritual goods that liberalism concerns itself exclusively with man's material well-being, but from a conviction that what is highest and deepest in man cannot be touched by any outward regulation.

The thesis of etatism that the members of the government and its assistants are more intelligent than the people, and that they know better what is good for the individual than he himself knows, is pure nonsense.

Production is "anarchistic.

The equality Liberalism creates is equality before the Law; it has never sought any other. From the liberal point of view, therefore, criticism which condemns this equality as inadequate — maintaining that true equality is full equality of income through equal distribution of commodities — is unjustified.

Mises showed that the end of private property would mean the end to economic rationality.

Our whole civilization rests on the fact that men have always succeeded in beating off the attack of the re-distributors.

Liberalism champions private property in the means of production because it expects a higher standard of living from such an economic organization, not because it wishes to help the owners.

Lessing has said that Collectivism is nothing less than 'the cloak of tyranny'.

There's no one more obnoxious and self-righteous than the self-made man. And no one more admirable.

Every fat must stand upon its own bottom;

Presumption said, Every fat must stand upon his own bottom.

Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.

We become strong, I feel, when we have no friends upon whom to lean, or to look to for moral guidance.

I like the libertarian view, which is to leave everyone alone. Even as a kid, I was annoyed by people who wanted to tell everyone how to live.

When it came to life or death, or anything else important, the only one you could count on was yourself.

A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.

Liberty consists in doing what one desires.