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...

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

Women, churchgoers, and conservative were more likely than men, nonchurch goers, and liberals to disagree with the reductionist (neural) account of human life.

The same way a compact disk isn’t responsible for what’s recorded on it, that’s how we are. You’re about as free to act as a programmed computer. You’re about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar bill

I didn’t want to be in the teeming mass of the working class.[…] I didn’t want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed...

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

Society has parted man from man, neglectful of the universal heart.

Perhaps, there is no such person who can be called truly free, but only those who can be deemed so by comparison.

Here beyond men’s judgments all covenants were brittle.

They might have you, and they pay badly enough to guarantee you decent company.

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore it if it be goodness. Nothing is at...

I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I’m beginning to hear the...

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

The political vision of the religious right is for the most part an individualistic politics of righteousness, not a communal politics of compassion.

I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.

She smiled. She knew she was dying. But it did not matter any longer. She had known something which no human words could ever tell and she knew it now. She had been awaiting it...

The only common good is the common liberty to pursue individual goods.

You’re in a horse race but you’re thinking like a sheep. Sheep don’t win horse races.

The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people’s stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription...

[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.