Quotes About Individuals

The longer I do this job, the less I like people. The species, of course," he adds grimly. "There are individuals I like just fine.

Never has any country given its people so many toys to play with or sent such highly gifted individuals to the remotest corners of idleness, as close as possible to the frontiers of pain.

Es gibt zwei Arten von Menschen: intelligente und attraktive Leute wie Sie [...] und die sechs Milliarden Idioten, die uns im Weg herumstehen.

aretaic ethics is a category of ethics that focuses on the virtues produced in individuals, not the morality of specific acts.

Muriel never had had much concern about the arcane reasoning that emanated from appellate courts. The conflicts in the law that interested her were writ large—guilt or innocence, the rights of individuals against the rights of the community, the proper uses of power. The scrimshaw involved in etching decisions into words was largely decorative in her mind.

All that is great and skilful exists with the minority. There have been ministers who have had both king and people against them, and have carried out their great plans alone. It is not to be imagined that reason can ever be popular. Passions and feelings may become popular; but reason always remains the sole property of a few eminent individuals.

individual investors, as opposed to institutional ones, which is to say people who would be described anywhere but on Wall Street as private individuals—played an astonishingly large role in the whole affair, accounting for an unprecedented 56.8 per cent of the total volume.

Around them, the city moved to its own hidden heartbeat, a rhythm that varied from hour to hour, tied to the movements of the individuals that inhabited it so that sometimes he found it hard to tell if the city dictated the lifestyles of its people, or the people influenced the life of the city.

I've found silence helps, but that requires patience. Uncomfortable with silence, the majority of individuals will seek to fill it, and unburdening has a lot in common with downhill skiing: once you start, it's very hard to stop.

The Supreme Court has never ruled that Congress can use the Commerce Clause to require individuals to engage in an activity they have chosen to avoid. Yet that is precisely what Obamacare does: It forces Americans without health insurance to purchase coverage. Such a requirement is unprecedented and unconstitutional.

Our historic imagination is at best slightly developed. We generalise and idealise the past egregiously. We set up little toys to stand as symbols for centuries and the complicated lives of countless individuals.

It is [the teacher's] business to be on the alert to see what attitudes and habitual tendencies are being created. In this direction he[sic] must, if he is an educator, be able to judge what attitudes are actually conducive to continued growth and what are detrimental. He must, in addition, have that sympathetic understanding of individuals as individuals which gives him an idea of what is actually going on in the minds of those who are learning.

Strait-jacket and chain-gang procedures had to be done away with if there was to a chance for growth of individuals in the intellectual springs of freedom without which there is no assurance of genuine and continued normal growth.

The reason we form networks is because the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. It's to our advantage as individuals and a species to assemble ourselves in this fashion.

Societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life.

In a sense, Out of Oz is an examination of how individuals keep going, keep reinventing themselves and their lives, even after life-altering complications have afflicted them.

If you know what makes one person's life change, then you know what makes a nation change - because a nation is simply a large group of individuals.

The principle of literature is devotion to the particulars of life.

Individuals are custodians of the life stream -- temporal manifestations of far greater being, forming from and returning to their essence like so many dreams.

In republican Government the majority however composed, ultimately give the law," he wrote in his memorandum and implied in his letters, and "what is to restrain them from unjust violations of the rights and interests of the minority, or of individuals?

Stereotypes lose their power when the world is found to be more complex than the stereotype would suggest. When we learn that individuals do not fit the group stereotype, then it begins to fall apart.

Public opinion is a term describing an ill-defined, mercurial and changeable group of individual judgments. Public opinion is the aggregate result of individual opinions—now uniform, now conflicting—of the men and women who make up society or any group of society. In order to understand public opinion, one must go back to the individual who makes up the group.

On a global scale we have the example of pollution. Individual humans have freely burned fossil fuels and greatly increased the amount of greenhouse gases such as CO2, leading to a continuing rise in the earth's temperature over the last century. The tiny particles also emitted have caused lung diseases and deaths. But each polluter gains more individually from his own actions than he loses, so he has no direct pressure to change.

Nevertheless, an iron rule exists in genetic social evolution. It is that selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, while groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. The victory can never be complete; the balance of selection pressures cannot move to either extreme. If individual selection were to dominate, societies would dissolve. If group selection were to dominate, human groups would come to resemble ant colonies.