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...

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...

Two ideas are opposed — not concepts or abstractions, but Ideas which were in the blood of men before they were formulated by the minds of men. The Resurgence of Authority stands opposed to the...

The Open Road goes to the used-car lot.

We hold further that Communism is not only desirable, but that existing societies, founded on Individualism, are inevitably impelled in the direction of Communism. The development of Individualism during the last three centuries is explained...

There is no need for us all to be alike and think the same way, neither do we need a common enemy to force us to come together and reach out to each other. If...

I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.

The first duty of a man is to think for himself

We like to think of individuals as unique. Yet if this is true of everyone, then we all share the same quality, namely our uniqueness. What we have in common is the fact that we...

But, of course, what mattered most of all was my deep-seated hatred of authority, my monstrous individualism, my lawlessness. No word in my vocabulary expressed deeper hatred than the word INTERFERENCE. But Christianity placed at...

Knowing where you come from is just as important as knowing who you aren’t. You aren’t your own clone.

We are all valuable. Humanity needs our individual services.

The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its depoliticization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has...

Religion is what you do with your solitude.

Being yourself in a world which wants you to be someone else is the highest possible attainment.

When individuals combine in a joint effort to realize ends the have in common, the organizations, like the state, that they form for this purpose are given their own system of ends and their own...

Liberty is not about class war, income war, race war, national war, a war between the sexes, or any other conflict apart from the core conflict between individuals and those who would seek power and...

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.