Quotes About Individualism

We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires.

If I upset some notions and went against established rules, that wasn't part of what I wanted to do. It wasn't my goal.

What's the most popular pastime in America? Autoeroticism, hands down.

When I was young I was called a rugged individualist. When I was in my fifties I was considered eccentric. Here I am doing and saying the same things I did then and I'm labeled senile.

I owe nothing to Women's Lib.

There's a line in the picture where he snarls, "Nobody tells me what to do." That's exactly how I've felt all my life.

There's a line in the picture where he (Johnny - The Wild One) snarls, 'Nobody tells me what to do.' That's exactly how I've felt all my life.

All universal moral principles are idle fantasies.

Any enjoyment is weakened when shared.

The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.

Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think.

I would like to suggest that the overriding belief systems of certain cultures encourage born sociopaths to compensate cognitively for what they are missing emotionally. In contrast with our extreme emphasis on individualism and personal control, certain cultures, many in East Asia, dwell theologically on the interrelatedness of all living things. Interestingly, this value is also the basis of conscience, which is an intervening sense of obligation rooted in a sense of connectedness.

You must look out for number one. If you don't, no one else will.

Pleasures are all alike simply considered in themselves: he that hunts, or he that governs the commonwealth, they both please themselves alike, only we commend that, whereby we ourselves receive some benefit.

It's my world, you all just live in it.

I am sure it must be true that people opt out of the mainstream society because they feel that there are going to be no rewards for them, if they stay.

Just in our lifetime our society has become looser and more private, it becomes extremely difficult to hold to any permanent commitment whatever, least of all to organized religion.

Disdain for authority is the bedrock of my character.

Between the poles of individualism and community, freedom and constraint, pragmatism emerged as a genuinely American philosophical outlook—and as a way of life.

MINDS ARE UNIQUE. They go wrong in unique ways. My mind went wrong in a slightly different way to how other minds go wrong. Our experience overlaps with other people's, but it is never exactly the same experience.

To sum it all up, the [Ayn] Rand belief system looks like this: 1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason. 2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right. 3. Charity is immoral. 4. Pay for your own fucking schools.

This is a paradoxical case where the normally presumed "safety in numbers" is a deadly betrayer instead of a savior. Given a choice, going it alone beats The Buffalo Jump every time, but it's very hard to bolt from the herd.

To make a revolution, to be a revolutionary, you have to believe in something. Some new master plan for everybody to obey. But to be a rebel, you don't have to believe in anything. You're just a rebel, and you only want to be free.

In the Randian cosmology the dollar replaced the crucifix. Christianity, she said, is "the symbol of the sacrifice of the ideal to the nonideal.