Quotes About Individualism

#1. ...for recent sociologists the dark secret at the heart of modern individualism is its failure as a mode of life...

Lee Patterson

#2. The Left likes to think of itself as the bulwark of progressive liberal individualism, and yet it seeks to progressively coerce others to fund every social program under the sun via majority rule.

Dave Brat

#3. 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

#4. The national characteristics ... the restless metaphysical curiosity, the tenderness of good living and the passionate individualism. This is the invisible constant in a place with which the ordinary tourist can get in touch just by sitting quite quietly over a glass of wine in a Paris bistro.

Lawrence Durrell

#5. I'm so sick of political correctness. I'm suffocated by it. We're so goddamn politically correct that we lose our individualism, our definition as human beings. Don't you agree?

Ronald Malfi

#6. It is the ultimate irony of history that radical individualism serves as the ideological justification of the unconstrained power of what the large majority of individuals experience as a vast anonymous power, which, without any democratic public control, regulates their lives.

Slavoj Zizek

#7. The music played, always pointing to the light, to the way out, or the way in, to individualism,

Morrissey

#8. We talk much more about individualism and liberty than our ancestors. But as so often happens, when anything becomes conscious, the consciousness is compensatory for absence in practice.

John Dewey

#9. We want to take our rugged individualism and turn it into a rugged covenantalism.

Kevin Swanson

#10. In many ways, the young are more religiously minded than the older generations. I think it's the flip side of an age of individualism. Youngsters are not afraid to tell you what they think, to express their faith and be quite exuberant about it.

Vincent Nichols

#11. I got tattoos for purely antisocial reasons, and now people do it for social acceptance. I miss the individualism.

Mike Ness

#12. Collectivism, as an intellectual power and a moral ideal, is dead. But freedom and individualism, and their political expression, capitalism, have not yet been discovered.

Ayn Rand

#13. America is still a frontier country of wide open spaces. Our closeness to nature is one reason why our problem is not repression but regression; our notorious violence is the constant eruption of primi-tiveness, of anarchic individualism.

Camille Paglia

#14. Corporation: a miniature totalitarian state governed by a hierarchy of unelected officials who take a dim view of individualism, free speech, equality and eggheads. The backbone of all Western democracies.

Rick Bayan

#15. Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.

Wendell Berry

#16. I'm very practical. What I'm reaching for is individualism for women.

Kathleen Turner

#17. I'm a daughter of the middle class with a strong sense of social mobility and individualism, like the waves of immigrants, like my Spanish grandparents, who made Argentina.

Cristina Kirchner

#18. 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

#19. A Libertarian society of unfettered individualism spreads its benefits to virtually everyone - not just those who have the resources to seize political power.

Harry Browne

#20. Great minds tend toward banality. It is the noblest effort of individualism. But it implies a sort of modesty, which is so rare that it is scarcely found except in the greatest, or in beggars.

Andre Gide

#21. (liberal individualism triumphed as long as it undermined intermediate structures such as nations, corporations, castes, but when it attacked that ultimate social structure, the family, and thus the birthrate, it signed its own death warrant; Muslim dominance was a foregone conclusion).

Michel Houellebecq

#22. It seems like whenever you write about Muslims, people assume that you're writing about the Quran, you are writing about the Prophet Muhammad. There's no sense that Muslims are capable of individualism, that they're capable of making mistakes that are somehow not connected to Islam.

G. Willow Wilson

#23. Philosophically, I believe that libertarianism - and the wider creed of sound individualism of which libertarianism is a part - must rest on absolutism and deny relativism.

Murray Rothbard

#24. The 19th century was the age of Individualism; the 20th and 21st are the ages of Socialism.

Francis Parker Yockey

#25. Abundance is rooted in community, not individualism. Abundance is what is before our eyes, but we cannot see when we are blinded by greed.

Terry Tempest Williams

#26. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy.

Ingmar Bergman

#27. If you wish to understand others you must intensify your own individualism. Why

Oscar Wilde

#28. Individualism turns a band into a society. Collectivism turns society into a mob.

Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski

#29. The philosophy commonly called individualism is a philosophy of social cooperation and the progressive intensification of the social nexus.

Ludwig Von Mises

#30. What's natural and right is to go with the energy of how it all has to work together. What's natural and right is interconnectedness, not individualism. What is natural and right is respect for the system, not killing the system. What's natural and right is love.

Susan Powter

#31. When I was a kid growing up in the '60s, music was an outlet for enlightenment, frustration, rebellion. It was more about individualism. Today it's just like a big business.

Joey Ramone

#32. Playwriting is the last great bastion of the individual writer. It's exciting precisely because it's where the money isn't. Money goes to safety, to consensus. It's not individualism.

John Patrick Shanley

#33. Now, there's a desire for order, authority coming from a feeling that society has gone too far to the side of individualism and liberalism.

Marion Marechal-Le Pen

#34. Citing both the Buddha and Aristotle, Sachs makes the case for a "middle path," a path of moderation and balance between work and non-work (what he calls, quaintly in this day and age, "leisure"), savings and consumption, self-interest and compassion, individualism and citizenship.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

#35. With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols of things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

Oscar Wilde

#36. In societies where one sees a higher prevalence of 'modern values' - individualism, vitalism and self-expression - there's also higher reported job satisfaction.

Edmund Phelps

#37. Progress in thought is the assertion of individualism against authority.

Oscar Wilde

#38. This sort of, arrogant individualism which imagines each new generation can somehow create the world afresh.

Helen Fielding

#39. Many of those engaged in a lemming-like march to the sea are proud of their individualism.

Neal A. Maxwell

#40. How catastrophic is it when the church herself becomes secularized and expressive individualism sits in the driver's seat in the church's life and mission. When the church has lost connection with Christ her living head, she loses her soul.

Harold L. Senkbeil

#41. I've run into certain geniuses of individualism - they are very few and far between - who live their lives completely on their own terms; they are very powerful and have a great amount of happiness. We all should aspire to that.

David Duchovny

#42. 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

#43. We love the indomitable bellicose patriotism that sets you apart; we love the national pride that guides your muscularly courageous race; we love the potent individualism that doesn't prevent you from opening your arms to individualists of every land, whether libertarians or anarchists.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

#44. The revolt against individualism naturally calls artists severely to account, because the artist is of all men the most individual; those who were not have been long forgotten.

Willa Cather

#45. I believe in Individualism. Find out what makes you unique and develop it. Don't run with the herd. Set yourself apart so you can stand out.

Monica Koldyke Miller

#46. God does not blame me for being an individual, but for my individualism. His greatest problem is not the outward divisions and denominations that divide His church, but our own individualistic hearts.

Watchman Nee

#47. In a society in which individualism is becoming rampant, people more and more believe that they are the center of the world. Such a belief system makes individual failure almost inconsolable.

Martin Seligman

#48. Part of this individualism is you feel this pressure that you alone have to conquer the world, and if you don't work all the hours God gives then you start feeling really guilty. If you can stop feeling guilty, then I think it's easier to start doing what you want to do.

Tom Hodgkinson

#49. 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.

William F. Buckley Jr.

#50. I think Americans generally are not used to working very hard, in terms of working for the collective. I think in our country we have taken individualism to its farthest reaches, possibly.

Alice Walker

#51. 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

#52. A form of conservatism that makes clear we have problems in this country, it's not just about individualism, we have to help people who feel they're being failed by the system.

Damian Green

#53. I think the idea of individualism has become more dominating in our society. You can even see it by our political system: how people vote, the job situation, the sociological evolution that's happening, what's happening in the Middle East and so forth.

Nicolas Winding Refn

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

Oscar Wilde

#55. The church is challenging such negative cultural elements as superstition, rugged individualism, materialism, hedonism, permissiveness and utilitarianism.

Francis Arinze

#56. We are in a period of such individualism that one no longer speaks of disciples; one speaks of thieves.

Jean Cocteau

#57. Perverted self-love, when it became political, created individualism, or historical liberalism; perverted love of others, when it became political, created totalitarianism.

Fulton J. Sheen

#58. Our problem isn't that we're individualists. It's that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven't done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion.

Fernando Pessoa

#59. The greatest question of our time is not communism vs. individualism, not Europe vs. America, not even the East vs. the West; it is whether men can bear to live without God.

Will Durant

#60. you always write about individualism vs. community, and that you see independence as stupidity and instead celebrate dependency.

Barbara Kingsolver

#61. A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows that from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas of freedom. A free society fertilizes the soil in which non-conformity and dissent and individualism can grow.

Henry Steele Commager

#62. Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force.

Oscar Wilde

#63. "Freedom, individualism, authenticity and being yourself so long as you don't hurt another's physical person or property: Sustained success comes only when you take what's unique about you and figure out how to make it useful!"

Marcus Buckingham

#64. Truth withers when freedom dies, however righteous the authority that kills it; and free individualism uninformed by moral value rots at its core and soon brings about conditions that pave the way for surrender to tyranny.

Frank S. Meyer

#65. Individualism is bad for business - though absolutely necessary for freedom, progressive knowledge, and any possible interface with the transcendent.

Tom Robbins

#66. When we begin to think like everybody else thinks, that is dangerous. Individualism is part of our divine endowment. God made us as individuals and we are responsible before Him.

Dr. J. Otis Yoder

#67. 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

#68. More and more, when faced with the world of men, the only reaction is one of individualism. Man alone is an end unto himself. Everything one tries to do for the common good ends in failure.

Albert Camus

#69. I pattern my actions and life after what I want. No two people are alike. You might admire attributes in others, but use these only as a guide in improving yourself in your own unique way. I don't go for carbon copies. Individualism is sacred!

Richard Chamberlain

#70. Their surplus wealth to the mass of their fellows in the forms best calculated to do them lasting good. Thus is the problem of Rich and Poor to be solved. The laws of accumulation will be left free; the laws of distribution free. Individualism will continue, but the millionaire

Andrew Carnegie

#71. I took a bunch of pictures. You can see 'em on my MySpace page, along with my favorite songs and movies and things that other people have created but that I use to express my individualism.

Christopher Paolini

#72. So-called Individualism is the social and economic laissez-faire: the exploitation of the masses by the classes by means of legal trickery, spiritual debasement and systematic indoctrination of the servile spirit, which process is known as 'education'.

Emma Goldman

#73. Individualism is the self-affirmation of the individual self as individual self without regard to its participation in its world. As such it is the opposite of collectivism, the self affirmation of the self as part of a larger whole without regard to its character as an individual self.

Paul Tillich

#74. Modern conservatives are for the most part engaged in conserving only older rather than later versions of liberal individualism. Their own core doctrine is as liberal and as individualist as that of self-avowed liberals.

Alasdair MacIntyre

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

Deborah Tall

#76. The demands of unbounded individualism need to be weighed in the light of inherent social constraints which can only change their form but cannot be eliminated without eliminating civilization.

Thomas Sowell

#77. The pursuit of full humanity, however, cannot be carried out in isolation or individualism, but only in fellowship and solidarity;

Paulo Freire

#78. The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand. The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.

Paul Ryan

#79. At the basic consumer level, the profusion of fonts appeals to a culture that celebrates expressive individualism.

Virginia Postrel

#80. The chief safeguard of personal freedom in a democratic society is the anarchy and disorder of capitalist individualism.

Christopher Dawson

#81. Surrealism - in particular with Salvador Dali - was all about ego. It was all about extreme individualism.

Alejandro Jodorowsky

#82. There's been a boiling down of real emotion into a set pattern instead of individualism.

Skeet Ulrich

#83. Our individualism has always been bound by a set of communal values, the glue upon which every healthy society depends.

Barack Obama

#84. the task is to articulate not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis - embedded in interdependence rather than hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance, and cooperation rather than hierarchy.

Naomi Klein

#85. If the 19th [century] was the century of the individual (liberalism means individualism), you may consider that this is the "collective" century, and therefore the century of the state.

Benito Mussolini

#86. And only the very courageous will be able to keep alive the spirit of individualism and dissent which gave birth to this nation, nourished it as an infant, and carried it through its severest tests upon the attainment of its maturity.

John F. Kennedy

#87. 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

#88. Perhaps the seeds of redemption lay not just in perseverance, hard work, and rugged individualism. Perhaps they lay in something more fundamental - the simple notion of everyone pitching in and pulling together.

Daniel James Brown

#89. When there is no room for individualism in ballparks, then there will be no room for individualism in life.

Bill Veeck

#90. Would you believe, they insist on complete absence of individualism and that's just what they relish! Not to be themselves, to be as unlike themselves as they can. That's what they regard as the highest point of progress.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#91. In America, you have this kind of individualism and in the West, essentially, you have this individualism - this idea of my own personal fulfillment.

Aasif Mandvi

#92. Individuality doesn't just mean individualism-standing alone. It means developing one's unique gifts, and being able to share them for the enjoyment of oneself and others.

Frances Moore Lappe

#93. At the heart of excessive individualism is a broken heart

Robert Holden

#94. As a result, one can observe in many agents of evangelization, even though they pray, a heightened individualism, a crisis of identity and a cooling of fervour. These are three evils which fuel one another.

Pope Francis

#95. When three liberals get together they form a new party; that is their idea of individualism. They never join a bowling club without introducing as part of the 'agenda' an 'amendment of the statutes.

Oswald Spengler

#96. It so happens that America, according to all the polls that are out there, is pretty progressive. So you're not going to see messages that support Ayn Randian individualism at the cost of the whole, because most people don't agree with that.

Adam McKay

#97. Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State ... Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular individual; Fascism reaffirms the State as the true reality of the individual.

Benito Mussolini

#98. Individualism. Narcissism. Value-free choices. These are all key elements in the decline of the practice of mutual accountability in Western churches, among clergy and laity alike.

David Augsburger

#99. I got the idea [for Anthem's theme] in my school days, in Soviet Russia, when I heard all the vicious attacks on individualism, and asked myself what the world would be like if men lost the word 'I.'

Ayn Rand

#100. The energetic action of the times develops individualism, and the religious appear isolated. I esteem this a step in the right direction. Heaven deals with us on no representative system. Souls are not saved in bundles.

Ralph Waldo Emerson