Best individual & individualism Quotes

“As a myth of national purpose and as a program for individual conduct, the simple life has, in a sense, served as the nation's conscience, reminding Americans of what the founders had hoped they would be and thereby providing a vivifying counterpoint to the excesses of materialist individualism.”

Would Be Purpose Individual Nations Simple Conscience Program Myth Excess Individualism Providing Founders Simple Life Reminding Simple Living

Author:David Shi

“Collective judgment of new ideas is so often wrong that it is arguable that progress depends on individuals being free to back their own judgment despite collective disapproval.”

Ideas Individual Progress Depends Judgment Despite Collectives Individualism New Ideas Being Free Disapproval

Book:Theory of Economic Growth

Source: Theory of Economic Growth

“Part of the power of Emerson's individualism is his insistence, at crucial moments, that individualism does not mean isolation or self-sufficiency. This is not a paradox, for it is only the strong individual who can frankly concede the sometimes surprising extent of his own dependence.”

“Liberty ... was a two-headed boon. There was first, the liberty of the people as a whole to determine the forms of their own government, to levy their own taxes, and to make their own laws.... There was second, the liberty of the individual man to live his own life, within the limits of decency and decorum, as he pleased -- freedom from the despotism of the majority.”

Source: Alexander Hamilton: Lapham's Quarterly - Special Issue

“To speak his thoughts is every freeman's right, in peace and war, in council and in fight.”

War Fighting Individual Speak Peace Speech Defense Individualism Council Individual Rights Freeman Free Thought

Book:Translation of the Iliad of Homer

Source: Translation of the Iliad of Homer

“Pseudo-modernists pursue individual style because they know they cannot make a name without it; but if they had lived in the eighteenth century their sole object would have been to write correctly, to conform to the manner of the period. In practice, their conforming individualism means an imitation, studiously concealed, of the eccentricities of poems which really are individual.”

Ifs Knows Writing Mean Has Beens Names Individual Practice Century Style Objects Periods Pursue Individualism Sole Imitation Conform Concealed Eccentricity Pseudo Individual Style

Author:Laura Riding

“If the 19th [century] was the century of the individual (liberalism means individualism), you may consider that this is the "collective" century, and therefore the century of the state.”

Ifs May Mean States Individual Century Liberalism Collectives Individualism 19th Century

Author:Benito Mussolini

“The revolt against individualism naturally calls artists severely to account, because the artist is of all men the most individual; those who were not have been long forgotten.”

Men Long Has Beens Artist Individual Accounts Forgotten Individualism Revolt

Book:Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art

Source: Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art

“The member of a primitive clan might express his identity in the formula "I am we"; he cannot yet conceive of himself as an "individual," existing apart from his group.”

Might Individual Responsibility Groups Identity Members Independence Formulas Individualism Primitive Sovereignty Individual Rights Clans

Book:Sane Society Ils 252

Source: Sane Society Ils 252

“Individualism is the self-affirmation of the individual self as individual self without regard to its participation in its world. As such it is the opposite of collectivism, the self affirmation of the self as part of a larger whole without regard to its character as an individual self.”

World Self Whole Character Individual Opposites Regard Individualism Affirmation Participation Collectivism Self Affirmation

Book:Writings on religion

Source: Writings on religion

“The 'nations,' as they are called, with whom our pretended ambassadors, secretaries, presidents, and senators profess to make treaties, are as much myths as our own. On general principles of law and reason, there are no such 'nations.' ... Our pretended treaties, then, being made with no legitimate or bona fide nations, or representatives of nations, and being made, on our part, by persons who have no legitimate authority to act for us, have intrinsically no more validity than a pretended treaty made by the Man in the Moon with the king of the Pleiades.”

Source: The collected works of Lysander Spooner

“Every device employed to bolster individual freedom must have as its chief purpose the impairment of the absoluteness of power. The indications are that such an impairment is brought about not by strengthening the individual and pitting him against the possessors of power, but by distributing and diversifying power and pitting one category or unit of power against the other. Where power is one, the defeated individual, however strong and resourceful, can have no refuge and no recourse.”

Purpose Individual Strong Power Chiefs Devices Categories Individualism Refuge Defeated Units Employed Indication Despotism Strengthening Resourceful Recourse Individual Freedom

Book:Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer

Source: Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer

“An individualism which has got beyond the stage of hedonism tends to yield to the lure of the grandiose. It was not man, the individual, nor even the Supreme Being, that Robespierre set up against Christ; it was that Leviathan, the Nation.”

Men Individual Nations Christ Stage Supreme Yield Individualism Lure Supreme Being Hedonism Grandiose Leviathan

Author:Andre Malraux

“The great Christian art did not die because all possible forms had been used up; it died because faith was being transformed into piety. Now, the same conquest of the outside world that brought in our modern individualism, so different from that of the Renaissance, is by way of relativizing the individual. It is plain to see that man's faculty of transformation, which began by a remaking of the natural world, has ended by calling man himself into question.”

“What we call the freedom of the individual is not just the luxury of one intellectual to write what he likes to write but his being a voice which can speak for those who are silent.”

Writing Individual Speak Voice Speech Intellectual Silent Likes Luxury Individualism

Book:The thirties and after: poetry, politics, people 1933-1970

Source: The thirties and after: poetry, politics, people 1933-1970

“Once it has been perceived that the division of labour is the essence of society, nothing remains of the antithesis between individual and society. The contradiction between individual principle and social principle disappears.”

Has Beens Individual Social Principles Economics Essence Remains Disappear Socialism Contradiction Labour Division Individualism Collectivism Antithesis Individuals And Society

Author:Ludwig von Mises

“Socialism, whether it's the 'soft tyranny' of the EuroAmerican management state or the murderously repressive forms taken by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot, is all about disindividuation, a steady, relentless erasure of the individual differences among us, everything that makes us who we are. 'Everybody in, nobody out!' is the marching mantra of militant collectivized medicine, but it accurately describes all other aspects of collectivism as well. No alternatives allowed, no choices, no individualism, no individuality, and ultimately, no individuation.”

“If, of course, one builds into the concept of an 'individual' all that Professor Hayek does in his Road To Serfdom, Individualism and Economic Order and many other works, which is, to put it briefly, the whole of laisser-faire economic theory, then plainly man as such a programmed predator has very little interest in being fraternal, or very little chance.”

Source: In Defense of Politics

“If what is best in mankind, and what its progress depends on, manifests itself primarily in the individual and only secondarily in the mass, then our objectives should be to maintain such freedom as allows the individual to think and speak for himself.”

Ifs Thinking Should Individual Speak Freedom Progress Mankind Depends Speech Mass Objectives Individualism Free Thought

Author:Louis J. Halle

“Education, and the life of the mind generally, is a matter in which individual initiative is the chief thing needed; the function of the state should begin and end with insistence on some kind of education, and, if possible, a kind which promotes mental individualism, not a kind which happens to conform to the prejudices of government officials.”

Source: Pacifism and Revolution, 1916-18

“I think we need to find a way to provide people with a reason that the average man on the street can grasp and embrace, that would cause him to move away from the centuries-old idea of the individual and individualism, and move toward a different concept of what it means to be human in a collective society. Unless he has that reason, unless he has a fundamental reason to do that, it's going to be very difficult to cause him to make that shift, in my view.”

“Theres something unique about the United States, a sense of individual rights and freedoms, and a sense of social and civic responsibility that we contributed to so much of the world. We lost that mission in the 1980s and 1990s, when we entered a gilded age, and the culture of individualism became a culture of avarice.”

“Communism is a monopolistic system, economically and politically. The system suppresses individual initiative, and the 21st century is all about individualism and freedom. The development of technology supported these directions.”

Individual Technology Century Development Communism Individualism Initiative 21st Century Development Of Technology

Author:Lech Walesa

“The strongest reason why we ask for woman a voice in the government under which she lives; in the religion she is asked to believe; equality in social life, where she is the chief factor; a place in the trades and professions, where she may earn her bread, is because of her birthright to self-sovereignty; because, as an individual, she must rely on herself.”

Believe May Self Reason Government Asks Individual Social Voice Trade Profession Bread Factors Chiefs Reason Why Rely Strongest Individualism Sovereignty Social Life Birthright

Author:Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“It is open to question whether the highly individualized characters we find in Shakespeare are perhaps not detrimental to the dramatic effect. The human being disappears to the same degree as the individual emerges.”

Humans Character Individual Human Beings Effects Human Nature Drama Degrees Disappear Dramatic Individualism Detrimental

Author:Franz Grillparzer

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