American Individualism Quotes

#1. Our individualism is rooted in our very nature. It is based on conviction born of experience. Equal opportunity, the demand for a fair chance, became the formula of American Individualism because it is the method of American achievement.

Herbert Hoover

#2. The real Jack Johnson was both more and less than those who loved or those who hated him ever knew. He embodied American individualism in its purest form; nothing - no law or custom, no person white or black, male or female - could keep him for long from whatever he wanted.

Geoffrey Ward

#3. American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.

Wallace Stegner

#4. Here beyond men's judgments all covenants were brittle.

Cormac McCarthy

#5. For Americans, the car is the American way. Jay Gatsby roars through capitalism, individual freedom, and the good life. For China, the train is the metaphor. Everyone's on board, there's no chance to steer, and it's clickety-clack to collectivism's dreams.

Mei Fong

#6. The measure of a life well lived is how many good dogs you can fit into it.
[or cats]

Marion Lennox

#7. The American nuclear family made America great, but few are now defending it against forces determined to destroy it. If America continues to have many immigrants with different family types, we are less likely to maintain American values of personal freedom, individualism, and limited government.

Phyllis Schlafly

#8. Individualism and mobility are at the core of American identity

Deborah Tall

#9. Everything changes when a man becomes purple

Charlie McDonnell

#10. Growing up, I mostly read comic books and sci-fi. Then I discovered the book 'Jane Eyre' by Jane Austen. It introduced me to the world of romance, which I have since never left. Also, the world of the first-person narrative.

Meg Cabot

#11. For all the huffing and blowing we get about rugged individualism, the American spirit and the American experiment always have had at their heart the notion that the government is all of us and that, therefore, the government may keep things in trust for all of us.

Charlie Pierce

#12. The European and the North American consider that a book that has been awarded any kind of prize must be good; the Argentine allows for the possibility that the book might not be bad, despite the prize.

Jorge Luis Borges

#13. But would the perpetual flux and reflux of individualism reduce all personality to the level of mass consciousness? Would American culture remain neither bourgeois nor proletarian, but infantile? Would the moron, instead of the meek, inherit democracy?

Ellen Glasgow

#14. A Pakistani exchange student's maternal American host "managed to summon the transforming question of her culture, built on the revolutionary idea that people are the sovereign, the boss, captains of their own fate.
She said, simply, "But what do YOU think?

Ron Suskind

#15. I am now a fundamentalist American; give me time and I will tell you why individualism, laissez-faire and the slightly restrained anarchy of capitalism offer the best opportunities for the development of the human spirit.

Rose Wilder Lane

#16. It [the Harlem Renaissance] was a time of black individualism, a time marked by a vast array of characters whose uniqueness challenged the traditional inability of white Americans to differentiate between blacks.

Clement Alexander Price

#17. I don't believe in that kind of American John Wayne individualism where people pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Someone changed your diapers. And if that's the case, you ain't self-made.

Michael Eric Dyson

#18. So efficient are the available instruments of slavery; fingerprints, lie detectors, brain washings, gas chambers; that we shiver at the thought of political change which might put these instruments in the hands of men of hate.

Bernard Baruch

#19. If you're making a social call, don't call past 8 P.M. The evening is a time when people need a respite from their work - a time to unwind, uninterrupted.

Letitia Baldrige

#20. It was a place where, if troubles did not vanish, they were made bearable.

Harper Lee

#21. I'm less interested in proselytizing or a bigger tent for its own sake than in issues of human flourishing. What are the best conditions in which people live and flourish? It's more the, How do we get along? What does it mean for living now?

Karen L. King

#22. Community in the American university is paradoxically a private and individual decision.

Rebekah Nathan

#23. We are the echo of the future.

W.S. Merwin

#24. Thou shalt make no image, no abstraction, including none of THE American, THE Swiss, THE German.

Karl Barth

#25. Forgiveness is spiritual. Punishment is legal," Leo says. "They're not mutually exclusive.

Jodi Picoult

#26. Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.

Baruch Spinoza

#27. Baseball exemplifies a tension in the American mind, the constant pull between our atomistic individualism and our yearning for community.

George Will

#28. The American Dream was not about government's taking huge sums of money (under the label of "taxation") from citizens by force. The American Dream was about individualism and the opportunity to achieve success without interference from others.

Robert Ringer

#29. The artist needs to understand the truth that lies at the bottom of an enigma.

John Maeda

#30. The Open Road goes to the used-car lot.

Louis Simpson