Best 384 quotes in «individualism quotes» category

But mostly because he could be himself - never needing to bend.

But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self. And is not our modern history, my brothers, the story of the brave malenky selves fighting these big machines?" nah, that's too serious. How's about: “There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening.

But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing towards a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because they have tried Socialism and found it nice, but because they have tried Individualism and found it nasty.

By riding public transportation and reading newspapers, we become like the others, sinking further and further into the they

Capitalism believes in collectivism for itself and individualism for its enemies.

Check the history, more people died for freedom than love, people need freedom before they need love.

Children interested Miss Peters, especially when she found one that had not been run into a mold or cut out of a given piece of cloth and made up like a flannel rabbit.

Ci sono stagni, nel deserto di Sonora. Potresti finirci dritto in mezzo e non saperlo, perché di solito sono asciutti. Non sospetteresti mai l'esistenza di rane addormentate pochi centimetri sotto i tuoi piedi, il battito del cuore rallentato a un paio di pulsazioni al minuto. Dormono e aspettano, quelle rane del fango, perché senz'acqua la loro vita non è completa. Per lunghi mesi dormono sottoterra. Finché arriva la pioggia. E allora centinaia d'occhi sbucano dal fango, centinaia di voci risuonano ogni notte sull'acqua. Fu uno spettacolo meraviglioso assistere al risveglio di noi rane del fango, vivere quel risveglio. Piccoli gesti, parole, empatie credute ormai estinte tornarono in vita. Per anni, le facce estranee incrociate nei corridoi avevano ricevuto solo sguardi corrucciati; ora guardavamo, salutavamo, sorridevamo. Se qualcuno prendeva un bel voto, anche altri gioivano. Se qualcuno si storceva una caviglia, anche altri soffrivano. Scoprimmo quale colore avessero gli occhi degli altri. Fu Stargirl a guidare quella ribellione: una ribellione per invece che contro. Per noi stessi. Per le rane assopite che eravamo stati così a lungo. Ragazzi taciturni prendevano la parola nelle discussioni in classe. La rubrica "Lettere all'Editore" riempì un'intera pagina dell'edizione di dicembre del giornale scolastico. Un ragazzo fondò un'associazione di fotografi dilettanti. Un altro arrivò a scuola coi mocassini invece che con le scarpe da ginnastica. Una ragazza timida e insignificante si dipinse di verde fluorescente le unghie dei piedi. Un ragazzo si tinse i capelli color porpora.

Collectivists see the world the way Mr. Magoo did—as one big blur. They homogenize people in a communal blender, sacrificing the discrete features that make us who we are.

Collectivism is the "philosophy" of every cockroach and sewer rat: "If I want it, I must need it, and if I need it, I have a right to it, and if I have a right to it, it doesn't matter what I have to do to get it." The fact that such an inherently animalistic, short-sighted, anti-human viewpoint is now painted by some as compassionate and "progressive" does not make it any more sane, or any less dangerous.

Compassion without discipline is egregious self-sabotage.

Conscious of each other’s subjectivity in a direct and immediate way, they experienced no conflict between resolute solidarity and riotous individuality: they were indeed an association in which the free development of each was the condition for the free development of all.

Community in the American university is paradoxically a private and individual decision.

Disconnect from society’s pressure to conform. Do things your own way.

Creation from chaos is natural. We've come to a place where we've realized that we have this actual physical need to create things. We've discovered that we hate people en masse, we're sick of homogenized culture, and these realizations have left holes in our hearts. We create to fill those holes, to be able to sleep at night knowing we've done something, even a small something, to confront the manufactured culture that is currently being churned out.

Die Relativität aller Erkenntnis kann immer nur von außen behauptet werden, solange keine bündige Erkenntnis vollzogen wird. Sobald Bewußtsein in eine bestimmte Sache eintritt und deren immanentem Anspruch auf Wahrheit oder Falschheit sich stellt, zergeht die angeblich subjektive Zufälligkeit des Gedankens. Nichtig aber ist der Relativismus darum, weil, was er einerseits für beliebig und zufällig, andererseits für irreduzibel hält, selbst aus der Objektivität - eben der einer individualistischen Gesellschaft - entspringt.

Die Arbeiterbildner der Weimarer Republik […] sorgten sich während der ganzen Zeit ihres Tuns, dass ihre kleine Elite, ausgestattet mit dem geistigen Rüstzeug der Bildungskurse, am Ende nicht wie ein Sauerteig in der eigenen Klasse fortwirkte, um diese insgesamt zu heben, sondern den individuellen Aufstieg versuchen könnte. Dann hätte ausgerechnet die Arbeiterbildung durch erfolgreiche kognitive Vermittlung die Besten von der Arbeiterklasse gelöst und entfremdet, was dem Grundanliegen – der Emanzipation der gesamten Klasse – schroff zuwiderlief.

Disconnecting from one’s community is a personal choice, of course, but it ends up having social implications ["The Basement,” The Awl, Feb 5, 2015].

Coolness is not an image that can be bought or worn. True cool is an attitude that is projected from a person who is extremely comfortable in their own skin.

Embrace the virtues of individuality.

Each man is an island unto himself. But though a sea of difference may divide us, an entire world of commonality lies beneath.

Either ‘the group’ is superior or the individual is superior. Marxism, socialism, fascism, and pure democracy are all forms that give power to ‘the group’ and then use violence to force individuals to obey the dictates of ‘the group’. The concept of liberty is one in which the individual - in the exercise of his unalienable rights - is superior to every and all powers. That is what the Founders intended. That is what we are supposed to have under the ‘contracts’ of the Declaration of Independence and the state and federal constitutions. That is what I am entitled to as an American. That is what I insist upon. And that is what I will kill for.

Don't worry. They're all against me. But I have one advantage: they don't know what they want. I do.

Everyone suffers and rejoices in his own body, it’s hard to really feel what joy or pain another person feels.

[...]eu nunca tive porra de ideal nenhum, eu só queria era salvar a minha, veja só que coisa mais individualista elitista capitalista, eu só queria era ser feliz, cara, gorda, burra, alienada e completamente feliz.

Even in the act of fleeing modern ideologies, however, literary theory reveals its often unconscious complicity with them, betraying its elitism, sexism or individualism in the very ‘aesthetic’ or ‘unpolitical’ language it finds natural to use of the literary text. It assumes, in the main, that at the centre of the world is the contemplative individual self, bowed over its book, striving to gain touch with experience, truth, reality, history or tradition. Other things matter too, of course — this individual is in personal relationship with others, and we are always much more than readers — but it is notable how often such individual consciousness, set in its small circle of relationships, ends up as the touchstone of all else. The further we move from the rich inwardness of the personal life, of which literature is the supreme exemplar, the more drab, mechanical and impersonal existence becomes. It is a view equivalent in the literary sphere to what has been called possessive individualism in the social realm, much as the former attitude may shudder at the latter: it reflects the values of a political system which subordinates the sociality of human life to solitary individual enterprise.

Every one is expected to look out for himself here. I fancy that there would be very little rising if men were expected to rise for the sake of others, in America.

For everyone now strives most of all to seperate his person, wishing to experience the fullness of life within himself, and yet what comes of all his efforts is not the fullness of life, but full suicide, for instead of the fullness of self-definition, they fall into complete isolation.

Failure to recognize the historical specificity of the bourgeois conception of rights and duties leads to serious errors. It is for this reason that Marx registers...a vigorous indictment of the anarchist Proudhon... Proudhon in effect took the specifics of bourgeois legal and economic relations and treated them as universal and foundational for the development of an alternative, socially just economic system. From Marx's standpoint, this is no alternative at all since it merely re-inscribes bourgeois conceptions of value in a supposedly new form of society. This problem is still with us, not only because of the contemporary anarchist revival of interest in Proudhon's ideas but also because of the rise of a more broad-based liberal human rights politics as a supposed antidote to the social and political ills of contemporary capitalism. Marx's critique of Proudhon is directly applicable to this contemporary politics. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 is a foundational document for a bourgeois, market-based individualism and as such cannot provide a basis for a thoroughgoing critique of liberal or neoliberal capitalism. Whether it is politically useful to insist that the capitalist political order live up to its own foundational principles is one thing, but to imagine that this politics can lead to a radical displacement of a capitalist mode of production is, in Marx's view, a serious error.

Feet on the ground, eyes to the stars, heart in union with the Superior.

For at the beginning of the twentieth century, the nation had been struggling to find its way. Terror had raged, a second civil war had threatened to split the nation into new feuding armies, and the inequities of industrial life had brutalized too many lives. Three men who were caught up in those traumatic times, shaped by them, found with their talents, energy, and ideals a way out of it, both for themselves and for the nation. Darrow, Billy, D.W. were all flawed - egotists, temperamental, and too often morally complacent. But as their careers and lives intersected in Los Angeles at the tail end of the first decade of the twentieth century, each in his own way helped to move America into the modern world. They were individuals willing to fight for their beliefs; and the legacy of their battles, their cultural and political brawls, remains part of our national consciousness.

...for recent sociologists the dark secret at the heart of modern individualism is its failure as a mode of life...

For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses.

For too long in this society, we have celebrated unrestrained individualism over common community. For too long as a nation, we have been lulled by the anthem of self-interest. For a decade, led by Ronald Reagan, self-aggrandizement has been the full-throated cry of this society: "I've got mine, so why don't you get yours" and "What's in it for me?

For, whatever was the case in de Tocqueville's day, not the passion for egalitarianism but an individualist, that is anti-authoritarian, antinomian though curiously legalistic anarchism, has become the core of the value system in the USA.

existing is value-making

Expressive individualism is at the heart of the secular progressive worldview that now functions as the religion of many Western elites.

For Americans, the car is the American way. Jay Gatsby roars through capitalism, individual freedom, and the good life. For China, the train is the metaphor. Everyone's on board, there's no chance to steer, and it's clickety-clack to collectivism's dreams.

For good or ill, God is dead in Europe and I do not see much chance of revival except in the wake of catastrophe. Not quite everything has been lost of the religious attitude, however; individuals still think of themselves as a being of unique importance, but without the countervailing humility of considering themselves to have a duty towards the author of their being, a being inconceivably larger than themselves. Far from inducing a more modest self-conception in man, the loss of religious belief has inflamed his self-importance enormously.

for me obedience to another is the decay of self

Freedom may never be conceived merely negatively, as the absence of compulsion. Freedom conceived intersubjectively distinguishes itself from the arbitrary freedom of the isolated individual. No one is free until we are all free.

Gen. Matthew Ridgeway "intended not to impose his will on his men, but to allow the men under him to find something in themselves that would make them more confident, more purposeful fighting men. It was their confidence in themselves that would make them fight well, he believed, not so much their belief in him. His job was to keep them to find that quality in themselves.

He knew most men only heard what they wanted to hear, and he had no desire to be like most men.

Here is the paradox of it: the more of an individual you become the more you realize we are interrelated, that success of one requires the success of all.

Herder put forward the idea that each of us has an original way of being human. Each person has his or her own "measure" is his way of putting it. This idea has entered very deep into modern consciousness. It is also new. Before the late eighteenth century no one thought that the differences between human beings had this kind of moral significance.

He who thinks a great deal is not suited to be a party man: he thinks his way through the party and out the other side too soon.

[He] seemed to possess, beneath it all, an immutable sense of self-assurance, but in addition to that, the look of a man ensnared by what he perceived to be his own Duty. A Duty that effervesced inside of him impatiently, dry at the mouth, shaking feverishly, and holding its breath in anticipation for—not his action, but in fact—the fruits of his actions, however distant these may have been. The goal was to satiate its thirst in as few moves as possible, instilling each action with an almost implied necessity for having a motive by which it must exist, which is to say that no action was to be wasted for anything, but only for that which was rooted in some definable and clear-cut purpose...Every action had to be a step in some direction and there could be no dillydallying, for Duty bubbling in the bloodstream for too long brought with it a kind of sickness...from which it was difficult to recover. Neither could there be any reconsideration, for the values to which one has sworn were unassailable and beyond the powers of one individual to reassess. And so, Duty, once instilled, must be allowed to carry on unabated, diverting sustenance away from other aspects of one’s character—driving them to a weakened state, brow-beaten by circumstances beyond their immediate control and relegated to their own downtrodden acquiescence to the bravado of the Parasitic Superego, and, as such, cognizant of their growing superfluity.

His primacy of self and willingness to perpetuate his will go beyond death and toward perfection.

Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.

How can I give up stalking when I have a family to feed? Get a job? I don't want to work for you, your work makes me puke, do you understand? This is the way I figure it: if a man works with you, he is always working for one of you, he is a slave and nothing else. And I always wanted to be myself, on my own, so that I could spit at you all, at your boredom and despair.