Quotes About Individualism

When I say 'capitalism,' I mean a pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism

On what principle are we to awake the sleeper? In the name of what shall the flabby personality, magnetised by trifles, be inspired, be made discontented with its present way of life of railways, telegraphs, newspapers and cheap goods? Individuals do not step out of the ranks because there is not the occasion. For whom, for what, or against whom are they to come forward? The absence of energetic men is not a cause but a consequence

The modern individual is committed to being successful, not to being a person.

Socialism of any type leads to a total destruction of the human spirit.

Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.

If an American was condemned to confine his activity to his own affairs, he would be robbed of one half of his existence.

The man who gives his own decisions priority over society is a criminal.

I don't think I'm really open to having Washington change me.

We stand up and proudly proclaim that Washington is not our caretaker and we reject a state, in Margaret Thatcher's words, a state that takes too much from us to do too much for us.

I do believe very much in movie as a one-man-show. I think that where I've watched movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.

We are now in the Me Decade - seeing the upward roll of the third great religious wave in American history.

I think a lot of people saw 'Fight Club' and thought, 'Right, here's our next Che Guevara, here's our next Fidel Castro, here's someone who's going to wave the flag.' And I was like, 'No, it's just a book. And if I beat that drum, if I play that song one more time, I won't have a career.'

I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.

I don't believe in that kind of American John Wayne individualism where people pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Someone changed your diapers. And if that's the case, you ain't self-made.

Sometimes I feel like John Wayne.

In our age of individualism, we see computers as ways through which we can express our individuality. But the truth is that the computers are really good at spotting the very opposite. The computers can see how similar we are, and they then have the ability to agglomerate us together into groups that have the same behaviours.

We cannot live, suffer or die for somebody else, for suffering is too precious to be shared.

Our soccer has always been weak in team-work. Iranians have been the best in the world individually, but as a team we are one step behind.

When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.

I race to win, not to please people.

America wasn't founded so that we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damned well pleased.

The only person to look out for me is me. I've got to make sure Corey Clark is all right.

No one in the American Enterprise imposes their beliefs. We clash, and I think that's what the West is all about.

I see myself as a small 'l' liberal, but not coalition liberal, necessarily.