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...

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.

Life is, if anything, the art of combination. Of discrimination. Of freely picking one’s own personal pattern out of a hundred choices. Not letting it be picked for you—either by the Establishment, or by the...

If our church was magically lifted off the ground and moved to a location fifteen miles away, would we notice the difference?” Western churches have become so disentangled from their own places that this question...

It is time to revive and recover the third article of the Creed; to live corporately and communally in a world of expressive individualism. . . . We need to show how the Holy Spirit...

This proves the significance of individualism; being able to face the music, to embrace it, and then create something beautiful from it. You can’t truly be happy unless you’re unhappy sometimes and the pinnacle of...

The Kantian imperative to have the courage to think for oneself has involved a contemptuous disregard for the resources of tradition and an infantile view of authority as inherently oppressive.

Men will not accept truth at the hands of their enemies, and truth is seldom offered to them by their friends

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

…Individualistic material progress and the desire to gain prestige by coming out on top have taken over from the sense of fellowship, compassion and community. Now people live more or less on their own in...

Propaganda is what gives us the freedom to do as we are told.

Confidence is knowing who you are and not changing it a bit because of someone’s version of your reality is not their reality.

The word “We” is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the...

Everyone’s different, and in that way everyone’s the same. Stand out by sitting down. Try my love seat—it’s made for two people, so you can be comfortably obese.

Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.

The social system of capital separates most people from the conditions of existence. This compels the vast majority to accept the mediations of work and commodity consumption in order to maintain a minimal existence at...

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].

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...

And even when they refuse to listen, I’ll keep talking anyway, hoping on a slim chance that the things inside my head are worth something to someone.

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...

Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.

Socialism provides safety in numbers. And that’s OK, if you don’t mind trading your name—your identity and individualism—for a number.

And yet we have what purports, or professes, or is claimed, to be a contract—the Constitution—made eighty years ago, by men who are now all dead, and who never had any power to bind us,...

Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration

born again” before it is believed.

There might be some sort of justification for the savage societies in which a man had to expect that enemies could murder him at any moment and had to defend himself as best as he...