Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

Your goal in life is to find out the people who need you the most, to find out the business that needs you the most, to find the project and the art that needs you...

[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...

In short, self-rule is workable only when a people are self-sufficient enough to reject the hierarchic system as it stands.

It’s weird not to be weird.

None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. Ah me! no man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding...

Live your own life the way you want, not like someone else, you must set your own path in life because you have to live for yourself, someone else can’t do that for you.

Ah, sir, that’s just mean. She’s not a Victoria’s Secret model, but she’s pretty in her way.

What is a drop of rain, compared to the storm? What is a thought, compared to the mind? Our unity is full of wonder which your tiny individualism cannot even conceive.

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.

Freedom is the realization that it is sufficient to simply be a human being.

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...

Loyalty, respect for authority and some degree of sanctification create a more binding social order that places some limits on individualism and egoism.

Just when we are in many ways moving to an ever greater validation of the sacredness of the individual person, our capacity to imagine a social fabric that would hold individuals together is vanishing. This...

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those...

To live in any true sense of the word is to reject others; to accept them, one must be able to renounce, to do oneself violence, to act against one’s own nature, to weaken oneself;...

I realized, listening to the silences that fell sometimes in my interview groups, that there are things that are sayable and unsayable about motherhood today. It is permissable, for example, to talk a lot about...

And the wind shall say: ‘Here were decent Godless people:Their only monument the asphalt roadAnd a thousand lost golf balls.

Enjoy being YOU, because no one else can do that for you!

And is this not the very reason for the establishment of the State? If there were cause and reason for confidence among individuals, the State would never have come into existence. The sacred and essential...

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

Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle.

And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and...

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...

Such is the disconcerting miracle of good acting; at its best it implicitly challenges our faith in who we are, who anyone is.

Be different. Be original. Nobody will remember a specific flower in a garden filled with thousands of the same yellow flower, but they will remember the one that managed to change its color to purple.

Our individualism has always been bound by a set of communal values, the glue upon which every healthy society depends.

Your corn is ripe today; mine will be so tomorrow. ‘Tis profitable for us both, that I should labour with you today, and that you should aid me tomorrow. I have no kindness for you,...

Men whose only concern is other people’s opinion of them are like actors who put on a poor performance to win the applause of people of poor taste; some of them would be capable of...

We hear a lot about identity theft when someone takes your wallet and pretends to be you and uses your credit cards. But the more serious identity theft is to get swallowed up in other...

I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete. It’s so fuckin’ heroic.

The uniqueness of every soul is not a theme that our current culture, obsessed with group identities, cares to assert.

That’s not in my yard.

Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism.

Man is an end in himself.

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...

Our culture places a very high premium on self-expression, but is relatively disinterested in producing “selves” that are worth expressing.

One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will...

As long as we don’t get turned into something that looks more like high school, more like everybody else and less like us, I’ll be okay.

When distinction of any kind, even intellectual distinction, is somehow resented as a betrayal of the American spirit of equal opportunity for all, the result must be just this terror of individualistic impulses setting us...

It opens the mind toward an understanding of humannature and destiny. It increases wisdom. It is the veryessence of that much misinterpreted concept, a liberaleducation. It is the foremost approach to humanism,the lore of the...

Who would you be but who you are?

The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!

I would rather have strong enemies than a world of passive individualists. In a world of passive individualists nothing seems worth anything simply because nobody stands for anything. That world has no convictions, no victories,...

At the same time, however, the necessity for economic change in our countries has led us to conceive laws and accept traditions often at the expense of the individual person. Just when many are becoming...

The matter on which I judge people is their willingness, or ability, to handle contradiction. Thus Paine was better than Burke when it came to the principle of the French revolution, but Burke did and...

If you want to be a slave in life, then continue going around asking others to do for you. They will oblige, but you will find the price is your choices, your freedom, your life...

When men reject reason, they have no means left for dealing with one another — except brute, physical force.

Writing of only one small part of the broader problem, namely the single-minded pursuit of individualistic ‘rights,’ [Don] Feder is not wrong to conclude: Absent a delicate balance–rights and duties, freedom and order–the social fabric...

At the same time, we held back. Because she was different. Different. We had no one to compare her to, no one to measure her against.