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.

After Napoleon’s 1815 defeat at Waterloo, Europeans had created nation-states in the image and likeness of Napoleon. The new states became the foci of popular affection, even worship. All organized themselves as Napoleon had France,...

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...

A child who does not think about what happens around him and is content with living without wondering whether he lives honestly is like a man who lives from a scoundrel’s work and is on...

when you are surrounded by sheep then it is easy to become one yourself.

[…]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.

As a person, I have to claim my persona as my own. If I don’t, my clone will do it for me.

You show me a capitalist, and I’ll show you a bloodsucker

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.

The last word of the Northmen before their entry in the larger world of Southern culture, their last independent guess at the secret of the Universe, is given in the Twilight of the Gods. As...

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

Sometimes you look at yourself in the mirror, any mirror, and you wonder why that nose looks as it does, or those eyes–what is behind them, what depths can they reach. Your flesh, your skin,...

perception define individuality

I believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.

When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine’s Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was,...

My conduct with my friends is motivated: each being is, I believe, incapable on his own, of going to the end of being. If he tries, he is submerged within a “private being” which has...

But love, like the sun that it is, sets afire and melts everything. what greed and privilege to build up over whole centuries the indignation of a pious spirit, with its natural following of oppressed...

No state, no government exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men.

Your hard-won triumphs can be wholly negated if you live in a climate where your victories are seen as threatening, incorrect, distasteful, or — most crucially of all, for a teenage girl — simply uncool....