Quotes About Individualism

The singular cocktail of xenophobia, individualism, defence of the rights of women and proclaimed homosexuality that Pim Fortuyn concocted in the Netherlands in 2002 was the key to a lasting electoral success. Similar features also characterize other political movements in northern Europe, such as the Vlaams Belang in Belgium, the Danish Popular Party and the Swedish far right.

Musically I was fed up with the virtuoso thing. Our gigs had become nothing more than an excuse for us to show off as individuals, and any sense of unity we might have had when we started seemed to have gone out the window.

Do you know why so many of us live alone?" a Swedish statistician I interview in the charming Old Town district asks me. He quickly answers his own question: "Because we can.

What followed ended up scrambling the landscape of Western culture so dramatically that it's hardly recognizable from what it was before. Luther was the unwitting harbinger of a new world in which the well-established boundaries of what was acceptable were exploded, never to be restored. Suddenly the individual had not only the freedom and possibility of thinking for himself but the weighty responsibility before God of doing so.

There hardly ever seem to be "encounters" in this great country, in which the one can always avoid the other. But where there is no encounter, where liberty is the only unifying factor, one naturally knows nothing of the community which is created through encounter. The whole life together is completely different as a result. Community in our sense, whether cultural or ecclesiastical, cannot develop there. Is

Luther was the unwitting harbinger of a new world in which the well-established boundaries of what was acceptable were exploded, never to be restored. Suddenly the individual had not only the freedom and possibility of thinking for himself but the weighty responsibility before God of doing so.

Noted by McLuhan, "The portability of the book, like that of the easel-painting, added much to the cult of individualism.

The excessive speed of mundialization, the exacting demands of the God of consumerism and the to-and-fro swinging, from one period to another and from one domain to another, cause inner heartaches. People feel like individuals "with no sense of belonging" and characters "without qualities". ( "The church was no longer in the middle" )

Really, I want to get this individualistic-thing down. I want to walk across the football field alone without looking like the last one picked to play soccer. I never was a cheerleader, I was a slut on my own with the thinking that if a tree has a good time and no one's around to hear it, it's not a slut. But sometimes you do need another tree around to double-dare you, or else you might end up doing nothing but watching TV when no one's around.

The devil take the hindmost!

the way coupling is envisioned in contemporary American society is not universal, it is not timeless, and it is not human nature. Instead, the reigning American worldview may well represent one of the narrowest construals of intimacy ever imagined. Where once the tendrils of love and affection reached out to family, friends, and community, reached back to ancestors, and reached up to the heavens, now they surround and squeeze just one other person—sometimes to the point of asphyxiation.

Can we find nothing good to say about TV? Well, yes, it brings scattered solitaries into a sort of communion. TV allows your isolated American to think that he participates in the life of the entire country. It does not actually place him in a community, but his heart is warmed with the suggestion (on the whole false) that there is a community somewhere in the vicinity and that his atomized consciousness will be drawn back toward the whole.

The only thing he thinks of is himself, Stoner pointed out. In his deepest heart he does not regard anyone else as truly human; no one except himself. He is the center of his world. Everything and everyone else revolves around him.

If you put into one room everyone who considered themselves a Nietzschean, there would be a bloodbath.

And as for social justice, if social is supposed to be opposed to individual, then social justice is by definition unjust. The

Markets are natural outgrowths of human nature, and natural rights. You own yourself, and you own your labor—and no one has the right to remove that labor from you for the good of the collective without just compensation.

Where the Athenians were tepid with regard to individual purpose in the absence of community, they were religious in their belief in individual capacity. They passionately advocated the notion of an order to the universe, and insisted repeatedly that mankind had not just the capacity but the obligation to uncover that order.

The best countries—and the best societies—are those where citizens are virtuous enough to sacrifice for the common good but unwilling to be forced to sacrifice for the "greater" good.

And what gives Professor Commoner the right to take someone's property and hand it over to someone else? Only if there were no property rights would such a thing be acceptable.

We become strongest, I feel, when we have no friends upon whom to lean, or to look for moral gudance

He preferred his own judgments and, if the truth were told, his own company, too. That was how he had always been, even as a boy, always by himself, stravaging the fields or the back streets of the Midlands town where he was born, looking for something and never knowing what, hoping to chance on something, anything at all, that would interest or amuse him.

A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle.

The U.S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. Your have to catch up with it yourself.

themselves and their own