Individual Action Quotes

#1. There is always more profit and more consolation in the public Offices of the Church than in private acts of devotion, God having willed to give the preference to communion in prayer over all individual action.

Francis De Sales

#2. As long as one was an integral part of that world, unaware of the possibilities and responsibilities of individual action, one did not need to be afraid of it. When one has become an individual , one stands alone and faces the world in all its perilous and overpowering aspects.

Erich Fromm

#3. There is no such thing as institutional conditions without any individual actions and no such thing as individual action without institutional conditions. So there is always personal responsibility.

Cornel West

#4. In order to this there must be something besides a general tendency to action; there must also be a particular tendency to that individual action. - If it should be asked, why the soul of man uses its activity, in such a manner as it does;

Jonathan Edwards

#5. All virtue lies in individual action, in inward energy, in self determination. There is no moral worth in being swept away by a crowd even toward the best objective.

William Ellery Channing

#6. Obedience is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose. It is the dispositional cement that binds men to systems of authority.

Stanley Milgram

#7. All rational action is in the first place individual action. Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons. Only the individual acts.

Ludwig Von Mises

#8. Success is completion. Success is being able to complete what we set out to do - each individual action, each specific step, each desired experience whether a big project or a very small errand.

Susan Collins

#9. An individual action, multiplied by millions, creates global change.

Jack Johnson

#10. Psychologically speaking, the rational, healthy response to climate change is to say to oneself, "What can I do about this?" But that question is often answered through individual action.

Margaret D. Klein

#11. I am a strong individualist by personal habit, inheritance, and conviction; but it is a mere matter of common sense to recognize that the State, the community, the citizens acting together, can do a number of things better than if they were left to individual action.

Theodore Roosevelt

#12. In a competitive world of limited resources, total freedom of individual action is intolerable

Garrett Hardin

#13. Liberty is the result of free individual action,energy and independence.

Samuel Smiles

#14. The progress of the world can certainly never come at all save by the modified action of the individual beings who compose the world.

George Eliot

#15. As the United Nations pushes for jurisdiction over the globe, it is important to remember how it has acted in Bosnia. The character of an institution, no less than of an individual, is revealed through actions, not words.

Wendy McElroy

#16. The individual's most vital need is to prove his worth, and this usually means an insatiable hunger for action. For it is only the few who can acquire a sense of worth by developing and employing their capacities and talents. The majority prove their worth by keeping busy.

Eric Hoffer

#17. Ideas become powerful only if they appear in the flesh; an idea which does not lead to action by the individual and by groups remains at best a paragraph or a footnote in a book.

Erich Fromm

#18. I think that most of the action in religion is around the home, is in families, and is in individual lives, and they can go on their own searches, watch their own TV shows, read their own books, form their own groups and discuss it, but that's where the action is - on the home front.

Bruce Feiler

#19. Duty is that mode of action on the part of the individual which constitutes the best possible application of his capacity to the general benefit.

William Godwin

#20. People can go very badly awry in this individual quest. But when the quest is fortunate, there comes a lifetime of creative innovative action.

Joseph Campbell

#21. Socialism" for the Nazis denotes the principle of collectivism as such and its corollary, statism - in every field of human action, including but not limited to economics. "To be a socialist," says Goebbels, "is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole."9

Leonard Peikoff

#22. What unleashes action is an individual's willingness to make mistakes - even to look foolish or stupid.

Robert Ringer

#23. I love raising awareness and encouraging people to take action for World Environment Day, because it demonstrates how individual voices can become a global chorus for change.

Li Bingbing

#24. All real freedom springs from necessity, for it can be gained only through the exercise of the individual will, and that will can be roused to energetic action only by the force of necessity acting upon it from the outside to spur it to effort.

Anna C. Brackett

#25. Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group - whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called 'the common good'

Ayn Rand

#26. There is likely to be a lag between the need for action and government ["an individual's" or "a team's"] recognition of the need; a further lag between recognition of the need for action and the taking of action; and a still further lag between the action and its effects

Milton Friedman

#27. The basis of action on love, the brotherhood of all men, the value of the individual ... the humility of the spirit.

Richard P. Feynman

#28. The pursuit of enlightenment is for the purpose of the world, not merely for the purpose of the individual. Practices for enlightenment must lead to action in the world.

Bernie Glassman

#29. Immanuel Kant's "categorical imperative" says that individual actions are to be judged according to whether we would be pleased if everyone in society took the same action.

Tom Butler-Bowdon

#30. Be assured that our individual actions, collectively, make a huge difference.

Jane Goodall

#31. The gap between thought and action, between belief and will, prevents us solving our most pressing individual and societal problems.

Paul Gibbons

#32. Each individual makes a unique selection of ideas fit a certain action for his or her own reasons. I can listen, suggest, offer alternatives, but the final choice must be yours alone.

C.N. Lesley

#33. I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the Whites. There scarcely ever was a civilization of their complexion, nor even any individual, eminent either in action or speculation.

David Hume

#34. If they [women] are to be integrated more fully into our society than has been the case so far, changes in individual attitudes of both men and women, adjustments in the labor market, and action by public authorities, will all be necessary.

Alva Myrdal

#35. Intervention for the prevention and control of osteoporosis should comprise a combination of legislative action, educational measures, health service activities, media coverage, and individual counselling to initiate changes in behaviour.

Gro Harlem Brundtland

#36. The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you've gone over that cliff. Saying nothing was more amendable, and over time I'd come to see that it was usually your best course of action.

Karen Joy Fowler

#37. both observing and breaking the rules involve moral choices, and both courses of action reveal something important about the individual involved. Contrary

Glenn Greenwald

#38. The Holy Grail of universal coverage in the United States may remain out of reach unless, through rational collective action overriding some individual self-interest, we can reduce per capita costs.

Donald Berwick

#39. The practical revolutionary will understand Goethe's 'conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action'; in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one's individual conscience and the good of mankind.

Saul Alinsky

#40. Every step by which an individual substitutes concerted action for isolated action results in an immediate and recognizable improvement in his conditions. The advantages derived from peaceful cooperation and division of labor are universal.

Ludwig Von Mises

#41. There is always a very delicate interplay between individual actions and institutional conditions.

Cornel West

#42. Nursing encompasses an art, a humanistic orientation, a feeling for the value of the individual, and an intuitive sense of ethics, and of the appropriateness of action taken.

Myrtle Aydelotte

#43. We are exceptional not because of who we are but because of what we do and how we put the ideals of human dignity, individual freedom, and liberty under law into action.

Jon Meacham

#44. Creative visualization may be described as an extended meditation session that reaches beyond passive contemplation and achieves transformative action. The uses to which it may be applied are limited only by an individual's imagination.

Aberjhani

#45. Judo teaches us to look for the best possible course of action, whatever the individual circumstances.

Kano Jigoro

#46. Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty and the end of welfare and affirmative action.

Ron Paul

#47. The teapot takes in water and gives out tea. So the human individual takes in anything you give him and promptly transforms it; he is ready to give you out again his own reactions - first, in thought and emotion, then in voice or action.

Louis MacNeice

#48. Under democracy, individual liberty of opinion and action is jealously guarded.

Mahatma Gandhi

#49. Real results will emerge when we realize the power of combined individual actions and voices to effect change.

Achim Steiner

#50. Jazz is improvisation and syncopation, with resilience and flow, with earthy elegance, nuance and subtlety, with the integrity of individual expression within (usually) a group context, with true democracy in action.

Greg Thomas

#51. Action based on reason, action therefore which is only to be understood by reason, knows only one end, the greatest pleasure of the acting individual.

Ludwig Von Mises

#52. And Habermas: mutual understanding in unrestrained communicative action unfolded by rationality is the omega point of individual and social evolution itself.

Ken Wilber

#53. Probably the most important aspect of individual defensive play is the 'close-out.' This approach to the ball should be made in a 'step-drag action' with advanced foot moving forward first and then the back foot in a boxer's type shuffling of the feet.

Tex Winter

#54. I once said that effort is between you, and you, and nobody else. The same can be true between and individual and their camera. What you're shooting is between you and you and nobody else. Outcomes are for the audience. The action is yours alone.

Ray Lewis

#55. An individual's state of consciousness (awareness) simply means his ability to accept change in his life. It includes new thoughts and new feelings, and the new behavior and actions that will naturally come as a result.

Harold Klemp

#56. You can hardly judge women's effect on politics merely from the action of individual women officeholders.

Florence Ellinwood Allen

#57. Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.

Thomas Jefferson

#58. The content and forms of American communications-the myths and the means of transmitting them-are devoted to manipulation. When successfully employed, as they invariably are, the result is individual passivity, a state of inertia that precludes action.

Herbert Schiller

#59. Understanding, and action proceeding from understanding and guided by it, is the one weapon against the world's bombardment, the one medicine, the one instrument by which liberty, health, and joy may be shaped or shaped towards, in the individual, and in the race.

James Agee

#60. The recycling of resource by the aggregate behavior of a diverse array of agents is much more than the sum of the individual actions.

John Henry Holland

#61. The other great heritage is Christian ethics - the basis of action on love, the brotherhood of all men, the value of the individual, the humility of the spirit. These two heritages are logically, thoroughly consistent.

Richard Feynman

#62. For we have always understood that when times change, so must we, that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges, that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.

Barack Obama

#63. Affirmative action based on quotas is wrong - wrong because it is antithetical to the genius of the American idea: individual liberty.

Jack Kemp

#64. It is impossible for us to make any real advance until we take to heart this great truth, that without freedom of choice, without freedom of action, there are not such things as true moral qualities; there can only be submissive wearing of the cords that others have tied round our hands.

Auberon Herbert

#65. Honor sets all the parts of the body politic in motion, and by its very action connects them; thus each individual advances the public good, while he only thinks of promoting his own interest.

Baron De Montesquieu

#66. My individual power is limited. I want to use my high-profile way to wake people up to take action together to do good things. I can only awake them with my performance art and creativity.

Chen Guangbiao

#67. We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#68. The knowledge and experience which produce wisdom can only become a man's individual possession and property by his own free action; and it is as futile to expect these without laborious, painstaking effort, as it is to hope to gather a harvest where the seed has not been sown.

Samuel Smiles

#69. The only conception of freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the individual in the midst of the State. The only one I know is freedom of thought and action.

Albert Camus

#70. Knowledge is information that changes something
or somebody - either by becoming grounds for actions, or by making an
individual (or an institution) capable of different or more effective action.

Peter Drucker

#71. Yoga is a philosophy of discipline and meditation that transforms the spirit and makes the individual a better person in thought, action, knowledge and devotion.

Narendra Modi

#72. Right action tends to be defined in terms of general individual rights and standards that have been critically examined and agreed upon by the whole society.

Lawrence Kohlberg

#73. Thinking is progress. Non-thinking is stagnation of the individual, organisation and the country. Thinking leads to action. Knowledge without action is useless and irrelevant. Knowledge with action, converts adversity into prosperity.

Abdul Kalam

#74. Good character is the indispensable condition and chief determinant of happiness, itself the goal of all human doing. The end of all action, individual or collective, is the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

Aristotle.

#75. The State, in organizing security should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family.

William Beveridge

#76. Individuals make history, but it's also a collective thing, a wave that people ride in their time, a wave made of individual actions. So ultimately history is another particle/wave duality that no one can parse or understand.

Kim Stanley Robinson

#77. This integrative action in virtue of which the nervous system unifies from separate organs an animal possessing solidarity, an individual, is the problem before us.

Charles Scott Sherrington

#78. We have complete choice as individuals: the only decisions we can take are our own. And yet so many species use the state of being an individual as an excuse for inaction, helplessness and irresponsibility.No situation is so overwhelming that action is pointless.
Targassat of Surang.

Karen Traviss

#79. Personal Responsibility is the individual desire to be in charge or in control of an action or situation.

Sunday Adelaja

#80. The modern individual is committed to being successful, not to being a person. He belongs rightly to the 'action generation' whose motto is 'do more but feel less.'

Alexander Lowen

#81. We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.

Alan W. Watts

#82. The aim of all struggles for liberty is to keep in bounds the armed defenders of peace, the governors and their constables. The political concept of the individual's freedom means: freedom from arbitrary action on the part of the police power.

Ludwig Von Mises

#83. I fail to understand why gethes (Humans), talk about individuals versus society. They are the same thing. The action of every individual counts, and those individual acts of personal responsibility accumulate to create society. Snowflakes are equally blind to their role in causing avalanches.

Karen Traviss

#84. The sole agents, indeed, in the action of her novels are individual human beings. And the comedy is the outcome of their making fools of themselves and of one another.

Mary Lascelles

#85. If in previous decades large historic events drew people together and oriented them toward collective action, the recent double trend toward greater choice but less security leads the young to see their lives in more individual terms. Big events collectivize. Little events atomize.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

#86. And sometimes the difference between individual and organized indignation is the difference between criminal and political action.

Ralph Ellison