Quotes About Individualism

Romanticism valued individual voices, including those of women and common people. They tended to idealize the pastoral lives of farmers, shepherds, milkmaids, and other rustic people, figures who seemed to them to belong to a simpler, more wholesome, less cynical time when humankind lived in harmony with nature.

Those of libertarian bent often prove more generous than those of a socialist persuasion: where the socialist feels that it is government's job to look after the poor using taxes, libertarians think it is their duty.

Friedrich Hayek's, with his prescient warning in The Road to Serfdom (1944) that socialism and fascism were not really opposites, but had 'fundamental similarity of methods and ideas', that economic planning and state control were at the top of an illiberal slope that led to tyranny, oppression and serfdom, and that the individualism of free markets was the true road to liberation. Ignoring

I don't think a man can hurt another, not in any important way. Neither hurt him nor help him. I have really nothing to forgive you.

do you really think you're so much better than everybody else?' And what do you suppose she answered? 'Yes,' she said, 'I do. I wish I didn't have to.' But actually!

if ever you hear a man telling you that you must be happy, that it's your natural right, that your first duty is to yourself—that will be the man who's not after your soul.

The anti-mind is the anti-life.

The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man's first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men.

Rearden sat in his room at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, fighting an enemy more dangerous than weariness or fear: revulsion against the thought of having to deal with human beings.

he does not achieve through other men nor for other men, he achieves through and for himself alone, then offers it to others.

If a man dies fighting for his own freedom, it is not a sacrifice: he is not willing to live as a slave; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of man who's willing.

No group has any proper intellectual leadership today or any proper representation.

To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort.

I had to originate a philosophical framework of my own, because my basic view of man and existence was theories. In order to define, explain and present my concept of man, I had to become a philosopher in the specific meaning of the term.

We are fornicating in the sight of six billion people.

Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men.

Our name is Equality 7-2521, as it is written on the iron bracelet which all men wear on their left wrists with their names upon it. We are twenty-one years old. We are six feet tall, and this is a burden, for there are not many men who are six feet tall.

She saw the faces streaming past her, the faces made alike by fear—fear as a common denominator, fear of themselves, fear of all and of one another, fear making them ready to pounce upon whatever was held sacred by any single one they met... She had kept herself clean and free in a single passion—to touch nothing. She had liked facing them in the streets, she had liked the impotence of their hatred, because she offered them nothing to be hurt.

What I mean is, what makes people unhappy is not too little choice, but too much, said Mitchell Layton. having to decide, always to decide, torn every which way all of the time. Now in a society of pattern, a man could feel safe. Nobody would come to him all the time pestering him to do something. Nobody would have to do anything. What I mean is, of course, except working for the common good.

People turned to look at Howard Roark as he passed. Some remained staring after him with sudden resentment. They could give no reason for it: it was an instinct his presence awakened in most people. Howard Roark saw no one. For him, the streets were empty. He could have walked there naked without concern.

I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I've always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I've always recognized it at once—and it's the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that. Now I know what it is. A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters.

In a book of fiction the purpose is to create, for myself, the kind of world I want and to live in while I am creating it; then, as a secondary consequence, to let others enjoy this world, if, and to the extent that, they can.

Dagny, he said, looking at the city as it moved past their taxi window, think of the first man who thought of making a steel girder. He knew what he saw, what he thought and what he wanted. He did not say, 'It seems to me,' and he did not take orders from those who say, 'In my opinion.

A free economy cannot exist without competition. Therefore, men must be forced to compete. Therefore, we must control men in order to force them to be free.