Quotes About Individualism

today's flood of addiction is occurring because our hyperindividualistic, frantic, crisis-ridden society makes most people feel social[ly] or culturally isolated. Chronic isolation causes people to look for relief.

Everyone believes in his youth that the world really began with him, and that all merely exists for his sake

Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

Life is fairer when individuals are free to make their own decisions

In America, life is introverted, self-absorbed - and so is their music.

I have never cared much for people. Most of them are cowards, conformists, muddleheads, moneygrubbers, and they infect each other.

We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt.

I do not seek the good of others as a sanction for my right to exist, nor do I recognize the good of others as a justification for their seizure of my property or their destruction of my life.

We in the West seem to have made a fetish out of complete individual self-sufficiency, of not needing help, of being completely private except in a very few selected relationships.

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

I have no evidence that libertarianism leads to a better life. I just think it is morally right.

I've come to the point in my life where I encourage young Native Americans to become much more selfish about their personal needs and wants.

The last book I read was the book I've been rereading most of my life, The Fountainhead.

As in an icicle the agnostic abides alone. The vital principle is taken out of all endeavor for improving himself or bettering hisfellows. All hope in the grand possibilities of life are blasted.

I am a member of a party of one, and I live in an age of fear. Nothing lately has unsettled my party and raised my fears as much as your editorial, on Thanksgiving Day, suggesting that employees should be required to state their beliefs in order to hold their jobs. The idea is inconsistent with our constitutional theory and has been stubbornly opposed by watchful men since the early days of the Republic.

You remind us that we're selfish bastards. You're not one of us, that way.

This misreading of Scripture arises from combining our individualism with a more subtle, deeply hidden and deeply rooted aspect of our Western worldview: we still think the universe centers around us.

Western societies are, by and large, individualistic societies. The most important entity in an individualistic culture is the individual person.

In Western individualist cultures, the decision to become a Christian is a personal and individual decision.

If we're not careful, our individualistic assumptions about church can lead us to think of the church as something like a health club. We're members because we believe in the mission statement and want to be a part of the action. As long as the church provides the services I want, I'll stick around. But when I no longer approve of the vision, or am no longer "being fed," I'm out the door.

That every Nuer considers himself as good as his neighbor is evident in their every movement. They strut about like lords of the earth, which, indeed, they consider themselves to be. There is no master and no servant in their society, but only equals who regard themselves as Gods noblest creation...even the suspicion of an order riles a man and he either does not carry it out or he carries it out in a casual and dilatory manner that is more insulting than a refusal.

The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men.

People lost their humanity, and took values as arbitrary as those in a pack of playing-cards.

A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both." – Milton Friedman, Free to Choose