Quotes About Individualism

Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.

I'm not cynical, but I don't really want to have a boyfriend or husband again.

I don't really give a damn about too much other than myself.

I could never take orders from anyone.

It's an old anarchist dream that people can take care of their own lives.

Never count on the crowd to take care of you.

When I was running 'round in America, about 30 years old, I didn't want no woman. I knowed I could make enough money to take care of myself, but I didn't want nobody to take care of.

My way is to talk to my opponent so he makes it a personal thing. He starts playing me one-on-one, and forgets about his team. Meanwhile, I'm still playing team ball and eating him up. Some guys tried talking back, but you can't get a talker when a talker's talking to you.

The modern state does not comprehend how anyone can be guided by something other than itself. In its eyes pluralism is treason.

A recent widely publicized case unites themes of no duty to retreat and, in individual terms, conquest and mastery. This was the case of the so-called "mountain man," Claude Dallas, who gained his livelihood in the i 97os and i9Hos by trapping animals in the wild, isolated country of desert and mountains where the three states of' Idaho, Oregon, and Nevada converge.

Each person's self has become his principal burden; to know oneself has become an end, instead of a means through which one knows the world.

When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell.

The Renaissance idea of individualism never penetrated Africa like it did Europe and America. The African model of leadership is better expressed as ubuntu, the idea that people are empowered by other people, that we become our best selves through unselfish interaction with others.

But in practice there is no clear reason why a division of labour in society should necessarily imply a division of moral behaviour as well.

Liberal" in the nineteenth-century United States and Europe designated people who in many, but not all, respects would be called conservatives in the twenty-first century. They embraced minimal government, a free market economy, individualism, and property rights; they attacked slavery, aristocracy, monarchy, standing armies, the Catholic Church, and hereditary authority.

Collectivizing risk and considering the community as a whole rather than the individual was a form of "communism," but the practice paradoxically allowed people to maintain their belief in individualism. Probability could compensate for the limits of human knowledge.

It was no accident that some of the first bureaucracies took shape in the West: the National Forest Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (which gradually took modern form as the older Indian Service sank beneath its long heritage of fraud and corruption), and the U.S. Geological Service. Mythologized as the heatland of individualism, the West became the kindergarten of the modern American state.

The greatest changes in history have come when people were able to shake off what others told them to do.

Everybody is making his own rules to suit himself.

Social responsibility above the level of family, or at most of tribe, requires imagination-- devotion, loyalty, all the higher virtues -- which a man must develop himself; if he has them forced down him, he will vomit them out.

Property is not the natural and obvious and inevitable concept that most people think it is.

Comrades, I beg you – do not resort to compulsory taxation. There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.

Jill, of all the nonsense that twists the world, the concept of 'altruism' is the worst. People do what they want to do, every time.

I wouldn't want Larry to die through my oversight. Larry is entitled to work out his own damn foolishness without having it cut short through my carelessness. Duke, I believe in everyone's working out his own damnation his own way . . . but nevertheless that is no excuse for an adult to give a dynamite cap to a baby as a toy.