Quotes About Individuals

Individuals might be bred to sacrifice themselves, but the race as a whole can never decide to cease to exist.

Nature can't evolve a species that hasn't a will to survive. Individuals might be bred to sacrifice themselves, but the race as a whole can never decide to cease to exist.

All history is the same thing over and over...The technology may change, but the behavior is still human. We are who we are. Individuals learn, grow up, get better, wiser, stronger, healthier, kinder—or the opposite. As a group, though, we keep inventing the same behaviors. Some work, some don't.

Persons are not perceived as superordinated individuals—as agents who stand independent of their actions—but are rather ongoing "events" defined functionally by constitutive roles and relationships as they are performed within the context of their specific families and communities, that is, through the observance of ritual propriety (li

What should give you pause is that suicides scales with intelligence in the animal kingdom and you might wonder if this is not true of individuals as well as species.

The anthropocene is about collective action, not individuals. That's why climate change is such a clusterfuck. In default, they say that it's down to the individual choice and responsibility, but reality is that you can't personally shop your way out of climate change.

I have always found it peculiar, to say the least, when conservatives, especially conservative men, make these particular issues their ideological focus; there is something suspect to me about individuals who devote enormous amounts of time and attention dos objects they profess to find repugnant

I have always found it peculiar, to say the least, when conservatives, especially conservative men, make these particular issues their ideological focus; there is something suspect to me about individuals who devote enormous amounts of time and attention to subjects they profess to find repugnant

In Whitman's writings in and about New Orleans, the kind of man Whitman was attracted to can be found scattered over almost every page, be they oyster vendors, omnibus drivers, or street toughs. Their type struck Whitman's fancy — personally and politically.

Likewise, what emphasis should be put on great individuals versus on cultural currents has long been a matter of dispute;

As much as Henry Kissinger wanted to attribute historical movement to impersonal forces, he too conceded to the difference personalities make.

As with democratic politics, the market is a mass of individuals making discrete choices within a framework shaped by larger forces, over which they have limited control.

In reading The History of Nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities, their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.

pp. 6-7: I want America to return to the ideal of treating people as individuals, so I have to write a book that treats Americans as groups. But there's no way around it. Those of us who want to defend the American creed have been unwilling to say openly that races have significant group differences. Since we have been unwilling to say that, we have been defenseless against claims that racism is to blame for unequal outcomes. What else could it be? We have been afraid to answer candidly.

When the government intervenes to help, whether in the European welfare state or in America's more diluted version, it not only diminishes our responsibility for the desired outcome, it enfeebles the institutions through which people live satisfying lives.

I said: I don't ever find people uninteresting. On the contrary, I find them so fascinating and so highly-flavoured that after small helpings, I have to go away and chew them slowly and analyse the taste of them.

The things that are wrong with the country today are the sum total of all the things that are wrong with us as individuals.

Insanity in individuals is something rare—but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule, Nietzsche had said.

Thus we, as individuals, can become the victims of our own poisonous thoughts, but we cannot become the victims of the poisonous thoughts of another.

All historical experience demonstrates the following: Our earth cannot be changed unless in the not too distant future an alteration in the consciousness of individuals is achieved.

Take The Walk is not about individuals becoming great in order to impact the world, it is about discovering the greatness of individuals as they use what they already have to touch the lives of the dying, sick and poor. It is about normal people with careers, families, and responsibilities, asking 'How can what I already do and what I already am make a difference in lives half a world away?

The values to which the conservative appeals are inevitably caricatured by the individuals designated to put them into practice.

I will criticize individuals when they deserve criticism, but I will not condemn entire populations. We have seen where that leads.

through the lives and souls of specific individuals. The truth is, life is unfair, and we would do well to come to terms with that fact.