Quotes About Individualism

I have always despised people who join societies. In general, I feel that groups of any kind are for the weak. The need for consensus is the most disgusting and pathetic aspect of our human world. Is there none who can simply wander alone beneath a sort of cloth tent painted with dreams?

Adrian: "I've made my position clear, Mr. Skerry. It's not my job to protect people from their own stupidity." Resonator: "And I like to give hand granades to babies ... let's be friends!?

401(k)s were part of a larger cultural drift in America away from shared responsibilities toward a more precarious individualism.

It is one of the most characteristic and destructive developments of our own society that man, becoming more and more of an instrument, transforms reality more and more into something relative to his own interests and functions.

La maggior parte della gente non si rende nemmeno conto del proprio bisogno di conformismo. Vive nell'illusione di seguire le proprie idee ed inclinazioni, di essere individualista, di aver raggiunto da sé le proprie convinzioni; e si dà il fatto che le sue idee siano le stesse della maggioranza.

Une société essentiellement vouée au consumérisme et à l'accumulation de marchandises induit l'individu à minorer son souci d'être (être bien, être quelqu'un de bien, faire le bien) et à majorer ses tendances à avoir, à accaparer, à s'aliéner dans les choses, accumuler les pouvoirs.

Protestantism and Calvinism, while giving expression to a new feeling of freedom, at the same time constituted an escape from the burden of freedom

The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.

Assume, for instance, that 20 percent of the American car-consuming population were to decide not to buy private automobiles any more, because they believed that, in comparison with excellent public transportation, the private automobile is economically wasteful, ecologically poisonous, and psychologically damaging—a drug that creates an artificial feeling of power, increases envy, and helps one to run away from oneself.

the structure of modern society affects man in two ways simultaneously: he becomes more independent, self-reliant, and critical, and he becomes more isolated, alone, and afraid. The understanding of the whole problem of freedom depends on the very ability to see both sides of the process and not to lose track of one side while following the other.

Ja sam moderan ?ovek i vrlo sam sklon samouništenju.

Kad cilv?ks ir pieaudzis? [..] Kad vair?k dom? par sevi nek? par citiem.

Šodien katrs dom? par sevi. P?r?k daudz pasaul? nelaimes.

He was a loner and intellectually intolerant.

I'm going to tell you something about myself. I pay my own way as I go through the world, and I want the privilege of living my own life. I left North Mesa because I couldn't do just that. I have my own code, my own creed, and my own ideas. I try to be true to them, all of them. I hate hypocrisy. I like fair play. I want to live my own life in my own way, and I'm willing to let other people live their lives in their way.

Modern man became psychological because he became isolated from protective collective ideologies. He had to justify himself from within himself.

The rifle and the pistol are still the equalizer when one man is more of a man than another, and if…he is really smart…he will get a permit to carry one and then drop around to Abercrombie and Fitch and buy himself a .22 caliber Colt automatic pistol, '''Woodsman model''', with a five-inch barrel and a box of shells. I advise him to get lubricated hollow points to avoid jams and to ensure a nice expansion on the bullet. He might even get several boxes and practice a little…

These developments, in conjunction with postwar economic prosperity, have contributed to a period of unmatched freedom and individualism.

the rise of individualism, the emergence of consumer culture, and the mandate for happiness have transformed matrimony and its adulterous shadow. Affairs are not what they used to be because marriage is not what it used to be.

In the move from the village to the city, we became more free but also more alone. Individualism began its remorseless conquest of Western civilization. Mate selection became infused with romantic aspirations meant to counter the increasing isolation of modern life.

Our individualistic society produces an uncanny paradox: As the need for faithfulness intensifies, so too does the pull toward unfaithfulness.

But in a culture that mandates individual fulfillment and lures us with the promise of being happier, never have we been more tempted to stray. Perhaps this is why we condemn infidelity more than ever even as we practice it more than ever.

Voltaire, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ibsen! Atheists, fools, and madmen! And your poets! This Dowson, and this Baudelaire, and Swinburne and Oscar Wilde, and Whitman and Poe! Whoremongers and degenerates!

It's human; we all put self interest first.