Quotes About Individualism

When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.

I don't believe in politics. I'm an anarchist, I guess you could say. I think people could be just fine looking after themselves.

Lots of people say we should fly less, heat less, and put on a sweater. But it's not going to happen. People are happy to say that for other people, but not themselves.

Each pursues his own theory, little solicitous to correct or improve it by an attention to what is advanced by his opponents.

It was reading Hamlet that ruined the concept of authenticity for me, not because Hamlet lacked existentialist credentials himself - indeed, as an earlier discontented Dane, he could be said to have laid the ground for Kierkegaard - but because the line 'to thine own self be true' was spoken by that humourless old ninny, Polonius.

I'm a classical liberal. A free thinker.

In ideal form of social control is an atomised collection of individuals focused on their own narrow concern, lacking the kinds of organisations in which they can gain information, develop and articulate their thoughts, and act constructively to achieve common ends.

Americans different in some maybe thoughts or emphasis still have the same ideas. They want a government that lets them be free, that leaves them alone, that doesn't interrupt and interfere with every aspect of their life, that lets them go to work and keep more of what they've worked hard to have.

I came out of the Soviet Union no longer a communist, because I believed in personal freedom.

The Old World belief is this: Individuals are cells in a greater organism. All men are naturally dependent, obedient, controlled by Authority. (Communists, Fascists and Nazis say this in a cliché, "The individual is nothing.") Government is Authority, controlling the masses and responsible for their welfare. Therefore, the stronger the Government, the better for the masses. Liberty

A professor, who had left teaching soon after World War II, lectured to a group of students at a major Western university a few years ago on the decline of liberty. To his shock, one of the first questions asked by a student was simply this: "What's so wonderful about liberty? What makes you think it is necessary for man?" For the students, security was a necessary social objective; liberty was not.

Anarchism has in common with Liberalism the idea that the happiness and prosperity of the individual must be the standard of all social matters.

America guarantees equal opportunity, not equal outcome.

As children we are all individualists; it is only as we grow older that we acquire a certain grey similarity to each other.

The conservative knows that freedom without any restraints may lead to oppression or anarchy, just as government without any restraints may lead to collectivism. But he believes the best and most effective restraint upon anarchic individualism to be obedience to moral law, the private conscience.

Tak d?ugo byli?cie antykonformistami, a? wreszcie upad?y ostatnie normy, przeciw którym mo?na si? by?o jeszcze buntowa?. Dla mnie nie zostawili?cie ju? nic, nic! Brak norm sta? si? wasz? norm?. A ja mog? si? buntowa? tylko przeciw wam, czyli przeciwko waszemu rozpasaniu.

Suicide is the holy right of a free man, the last affirmation of freedom.

Mon père disait qu'il ne faut jamais comparer les gens, chaque personne est différente, l'important est de trouver la différence qui vous convient le mieux. Cléa était ma différence.

Another does wrong. What is that to me? Let him look to it; he has his own disposition, his own activity. I have now what Universal Nature wills me to have, and I do what my own nature wills me to do.

that all salespeople are different, that all accountants are different, that each individual, no matter what his chosen profession, is unique.

Selfishness seldom has to do with reaching for the biggest piece of cake on the plate; rather, it is preoccupation with our selves.

The egoist loves himself without rivals.

If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.

Stupid, stupid, stupid: I'd believed all that claptrap about life, liberty, democracy, and the rights of the individual I'd soaked up at law school. These were eternal verities and we would always defend them. I'd depended on that, as if on a magic charm.