Quotes About Individualism

Individualism • The first of these practical philosophies is individualism. When most people today are faced with a decision, the question that seems to dominate their inner dialogue is, "What's in it for me?" This question is the creed of individualism, which is based on an all-consuming concern for self. In the present climate, the most dominant trend governing the decision-making process—and therefore the formation of our

Very few philosophers have been anarchists

Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self.

My power is my property. My power gives me property. My power am I myself, and through it am I my property.

The people is dead! Good-day, Self!

It is possible I can make very little of myself; but this little is everything, and better than what I allow to be made out of me by the might of others, by the training of custom, religion, the laws, the State.

We do not aspire to communal life but to a life apart.

He who is infatuated with Man leaves persons out of account so far as that infatuation extends, and floats in an ideal, sacred interest. Man, you see, is not a person, but an ideal, a spook.

The people's good fortune is my misfortune!

I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything.

Just observe the nation that is defended by devoted patriots. The patriots fall in bloody battle or in the fight with hunger and want; what does the nation care for that? By the manure of their corpses the nation comes to "its bloom"! The individuals have died "for the great cause of the nation," and the nation sends some words of thanks after them and - has the profit of it. I call that a paying kind of egoism.

I do not step shyly back from your property, but look upon it always as my property, in which I respect nothing. Pray do the like with what you call my property!

Now it is clear, God cares only for what is his, busies himself only with himself, thinks only of himself, and has only himself before his eyes; woe to all that is not well pleasing to him. He serves no higher person, and satisfies only himself. His cause is - a purely egoistic cause.

If religion has set up the proposition that we are sinners altogether, I set over against it the other: we are perfect altogether! For we are, every moment, all that we can be; and we never need be more.

God cares only for what is his, busies himself with only himself, thinks only of himself, and has only himself before his eyes...He serves no higher person, and satisfies only himself. His cause is--A purely egoistic cause.

Only the free and personal man is a good citizen (realist), and even with the lack of particular (scholarly, artistic, etc)culture, a tasteful judge (humanist).

To the believer, truths are a settled thing, a fact; to the freethinker, a thing that is still to be settled.

Alles Heilige ist ein Band, eine Fessel.

Whoever knows how to take, to defend, the thing, to him belongs property

Man, you see, is not a person, but an ideal, a spook.

Entitled or unentitled — that does not concern me, if I am only powerful, I am of myself empowered, and need no other empowering and entitling.

Habt nur den Mut, destruktiv zu sein, und ihr werdet bald sehen, welch' herrliche Blume der Eintracht aus der fruchtbaren Asche aufschießt.

Das Göttliche ist Gottes Sache, das Menschliche Sache "des Menschen". Meine Sache ist weder das Göttliche noch das Menschliche, ist nicht das Wahre, Gute, Rechte, Freie usw., sondern allein das Meinige, und sie ist keine allgemeine, sondern ist - einzig, wie Ich einzig bin.

Do I write out of love for human beings? No, I write because I want to give my thoughts an existence in this world; and even if I thought that these thoughts would take away your rest and peace, even if I saw the bloodiest wars and the destruction of many generations sprouting from this seed of thought: — still I would scatter it