Quotes About Individualism

I suspect] that in the drive toward the liberal universalist notion of human rights that characterized the last fifty or so years, there has been an accompanying oversensitivity that, in practice, keeps us atomized and more likely to be manipulated and have our rights impinged upon.

There was only one trial of Galileo, and yet it seems there were a thousand—the suppression of science by religion, the defense of individualism against authority, the clash between revolutionary and establishment, the challenge of radical new discoveries to ancient beliefs, the struggle against intolerance for freedom of thought and freedom of speech.

The difference between our outlook and the Socialist outlook is the difference between the ladder and the queue. We are for the ladder. Let all try their best to climb. They are for the queue.

We don't permit anyone to tell us our business, nor do we wish to tell anyone his. The same goes for moral outlooks. Don't tread on us and we won't on you. We're a tolerant, liberty-loving bunch, we Wolfes.

I believe that the American poet ought to be a tough son of a bitch. He sought to hold his own in this culture on his own terms and not compromise under any circumstances.

Four million people going around in aimless circles, going nowhere, getting nowhere. And they're all doing their jobs. And when they're not doing their jobs, all they're thinking of is gratifying their petty little needs; dressing up in weird clothes; going to weird parties; muddling their way through their weird little lives...

Bailey might not have great intelligence or abilities, but his whole aim, thought and study was that of the born leader--to look out for himself; and he did it with that born-leader's confidence and intensity that draws along the ordinary uncertain man, who soon confuses his own interest and his own safety with that of the leader.

as Kurt Vonnegut pointed out [...] the literary novel has become extraordinarily privatistic of late. It's as if the big issues (Does God exist? from whence springs decency? what sort of species is Homo Sapiens?) were either settled or not worth discusssing, and serious writers should therefore confine themselves to their various ethnic heritages and interpersonal relationships.

The idea of autonomous individuals choosing everything—their beliefs and values, their history and traditions, their social forms and family structures—is a vainglorious idea, and could only have been invented by thinkers who felt compelled to construct society out of theories.

Self interest feeds more people than self sacrifice.

Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.

People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.

Yes, cannibals. People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.

But the majority will continue to insist—speaking metaphorically—that black is white, and after a period of exasperation, irritation, even anger, certainly incomprehension, the minority will fall into line. Not always, but nearly always. There are indeed glorious individualists who stubbornly insist on telling the truth as they see it, but most give in to the majority opinion, obey the atmosphere.

That's what I feel too—people aren't taking responsibility for each other. You said the socialists had ceased to be a moral force, for the time, at least, because they wouldn't take moral responsibility. Except for a few people. You said that, didn't you—well then. But you write and write in notebooks, saying what you think about life, but you lock them up, and that's not being responsible." "A very great

Karla like myself is of the new apolitical pick-and-choose style of citizen. I think politics is soon going to resemble a J. Crew catalogue more than some 1776 ideal. If somebody wants to run for office, they had better be able to explain why they want to run for office. Wanting to be a candidate seems, in itself, reason for exclusion.

In those years, people will say, we lost track of the meaning of we, of you we found ourselves reduced to I and the whole thing became silly, ironic, terrible: we were trying to live a personal life and yes, that was the only life we could bear witness to But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged into our personal weather They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove along the shore, through the rags of fog where we stood, saying I

Every man for himself.

There was nothing mass produced about the school, but if it was individualistic, it also had discipline. Discipline without regimentation, was Miss Bulstrode's motto. Discipline, she held, was reassuring to the young, it gave them a feeling of security; regimentation gave rise to irritation.

We are brought up to proclaim ourselves as individuals in such an extreme way that often we don't feel any connection to anything at all, not even to our own parents or families.

Baudelaire proclaimed the delight he felt when at last, in the evening, he was alone in the haven of his bedroom. There, he wrote, citing La Bruyère, he escaped 'the great woe of not being able to be alone', by contrast with those who lose themselves in the crowd, 'probably afraid they couldn't tolerate themselves'.

You should think about nobody and go your own way, not on a course marked out for you by people holding mugs of water and bottles of iodine in case you fall and cut yourself so that they can pick you up - even if you want to stay where you are - and get you moving again.

A society like ours, which professes no one religion and has allowed all religions to decay, which indulges freedom to the point of license and individualism to the point of anarchy, needs all the support that responsible, cultivated homes can furnish. I hope your generation will provide a firmer shelter for civilized standards.

Modern conservatives are for the most part engaged in conserving only older rather than later versions of liberal individualism. Their own core doctrine is as liberal and as individualist as that of self-avowed liberals.