Top 100 Quotes About The Individual In Society
#1. The strains and stresses suffered by the individual in society are grounded in the normal functioning of that society (and of the individual!) rather than in its disturbances and diseases.
Herbert Marcuse
#2. 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
#3. The revulsion from an unwanted self, and the impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off and lose it, produce both a readiness to sacrifice the self and a willingness to dissolve it by losing one's individual distinctness in a compact collective whole.
Eric Hoffer
#4. Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad, mob-like behaviors.
Jaron Lanier
#5. The disparagement of empirical evidence in favor of a metaphysical world of illusion has its origin in the conflicy between the emancipated individual of bourgeois society and his fate within that society.
Max Horkheimer
#6. Persons of genius are, ex vi termini, more individual than any other people - less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their character.
John Stuart Mill
#7. In short, individual freedom of speech leads to a stronger society. But knowing that principle is not enough. You have to know how to put it to use on the Net.
Mike Godwin
#8. The individual seeks out the heat of the crowd, in this century, to protect himself against the cold emanating from the corpse of the world.
Nicolas Gomez Davila
#9. The clown has great importance as part of the search for what is laughable and ridiculous in man. We should put the emphasis on the rediscovery of our own individual clown, the one that has grown-up within us and which society does not allow us to express.
Jacques Lecoq
#10. Ironically, the utterly unselective omnivore
"I'm easy; I'll eat anything"
can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#11. For an individual as well as a society, there is a gulf between merely living and living worthily. To fight in a battle and live in glory is one mode. To beat a retreat, to surrender and to live the life of a captive is also a mode of survival.
B.R. Ambedkar
#12. The State is a gang of thieves writ large - the most immoral, grasping and unscrupulous individuals in any society.
Murray Rothbard
#13. Divinity lies all around us, but society remains too hidebound to accept that fact ... The mother sea and the fountain-head of all religions lies in the mystical experiences of the individual.
William James
#14. That I have the right to express myself freely at all times in all circumstances entails the idea that free speech is a 'basic human right' possessed by each individual, and, as such, trumps the interests of the society or group, including my neighbour.
Tom Stoppard
#15. I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man's spiritual growth.
Rachel Carson
#16. It's society that disables an individual by not investing in enough creativity to allow for someone to show us the quality that makes them rare and valuable and capable.
Aimee Mullins
#17. A civilized society is formed when every individual in that society are bound to obey the rules and regulation which is for the benefit of their own society.
Santosh Kalwar
#18. The individual is the true reality of life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called "society," or the "nation," which is only a collection of individuals.
Emma Goldman
#19. In order to arrive to a more realistic view of society, it must be recognized that there are individual differences that cannot be eradicated by the most rigid curriculum, and that various individuals will choose different educational curricula if allowed to do so.
Carl Eckart
#20. In a society of ideological believers, nothing is more ridiculous than the individual who doubts and does not conform.
John Ralston Saul
#21. I should like [people] to like the purely individual thing in themselves, which makes them act in singleness. and They only like to do the collective thing.
D.H. Lawrence
#22. 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
#23. My view ... would be that we are entering upon a new and interim society which is neither capitalist nor socialist, but in which we can achieve central planning without loss of individual initiative, by the mere process of absorbing initiative in the function of planning.
John Grierson
#24. Any power must be an enemy of mankind which enslaves the individual by power and by force, whether it arises under the Fascist or the Communist flag. All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual.
Albert Einstein
#25. I believe love to be hurtful to society, and to the individual happiness of men. I believe, in short, that love does more harm than good.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#26. The Islamic ethic is that if God has given you the capacity or good fortune to be a privileged individual in society, you have a moral responsibility to society.
Aga Khan IV
#27. 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
#28. Solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur is the cradle of thought and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society can ill do without.
John Stuart Mill
#29. Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.
E. O. Wilson
#30. Morality arose largely as an empirical defence of the individual and society. Ever since intelligent beings began to be in contact, and consequently in friction, they have felt the need to guard themselves against each other's encroachments.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#31. Political freedom is neither easy nor automatic, neither pleasant nor secure. It is the responsibility of the individual for the decisions of society as if they were his own decisions-as
in moral truth and accountability they are.
Peter Drucker
#32. There is a golden thread which runs through British history of the individual, standing firm against tyranny and then of the individual participating in his society
Gordon Brown
#33. The individual who has been liberated by reason is always running head-on into a world, a society, whose past in the shape of 'prejudices' has a great deal of power; he is forced to learn that past reality is also a reality.
Hannah Arendt
#34. Apart from the peculiar tenets of individual thinkers, there is also in the world at large an increasing inclination to stretch unduly the powers of society over the individual, both by the force of opinion and even by that of legislation:
John Stuart Mill
#35. In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.
Christopher Lasch
#36. In a democracy, society must recognize that the individual has rights which are guaranteed, and the individual must recognize that he has responsibilities which are not to be evaded.
Harry Woodburn Chase
#37. This is the problem of obtaining the co-operation of each individual in the joint endeavour of controlling our society.
Anonymous
#39. In our society, the ideal self is bold, gregarious, and comfortable in the spotlight. We like to think that we value individuality, but mostly we admire the type of individual who's comfortable 'putting himself out there.'
Susan Cain
#40. We can't live alone in any society. But the best way to help a society or group, is to be the best individual in it that we can be.
Ray Bradbury
#41. The semimetaphysical problems of the individual and society, of egoism and altruism, of freedom and determinism, either disappear or remain in the form of different phases in the organization of a consciousness that is fundamentally social.
Margaret Mead
#42. All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded the individual.
Albert Einstein
#43. Whatever mitigates the woes, or increases the happiness of others, is a just criterion of goodness; and whatever injures society at large, or any individual in it, is a criterion of iniquity.
Oliver Goldsmith
#44. Mental or spiritual health, which is rationality, makes for progress, and the future demands greater and greater mental or spiritual health, greater and greater rationality. The brain must dominate and direct both the individual and society in the time to come, not the belly and the heart.
Jack London
#45. Natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society.
Rachel Carson
#46. We [Latinos] must be proud. We have the same rights in the U.S. as anybody else. Instead of crying and getting upset about visa problems and having our families come join us, go fight for your rights. Make yourself a productive individual in the society.
Patricia Velasquez
#47. To give in completely to the instinctual urgings born from individual selection would be to dissolve society. At the opposite extreme, to surrender to the urgings from group selection would turn us into angelic robots - the outsized equivalents of ants.
Edward O. Wilson
#48. Ours is a representative republic with a Constitution in which is recognized the natural law and the natural rights of man. It is a republic with a spiritual foundation characterized by freedom - freedom for the individual and for his society.
Ezra Taft Benson
#49. A woman plays such an active role in society. And today, the woman who influences fashion is not that very rich woman who sits at home and polishes her nails. It's the one who works, who is a doer, who does things by dressing. She's very strongly projecting an image of herself as an individual.
Oscar De La Renta
#50. To assign to everybody his proper place in society is the task of the consumers. Their buying and abstention from buying is instrumental in determining each individual's social position.
Ludwig Von Mises
#51. Our mass media have little difficulty in selling particular interests as those of all sensible men. The political needs of society become individual needs and aspirations, their satisfaction promotes business and the commonweal, and the whole appeals to be the very embodiment of Reason.
Herbert Marcuse
#52. Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.
Simone De Beauvoir
#53. Education has in America's whole history been the major hope for improving the individual and society.
Gunnar Myrdal
#54. What the individual can do is to give a fine example, and to have the courage to uphold ethical values .. in a society of cynics.
Albert Einstein
#55. Individual rights always go along with the interests of the society. I want to add that in Vietnam we have no political prisoners. No one is arrested or jailed for his or her speech or point of view. They are put in jail because they violated the law.
Nong Duc Manh
#56. The disturbed individual who believes himself to be Christ, or to receive messages from God, is something of a cliche in our society. Ever since Sigmund Freud, many people have associated religiosity with neurosis and mental illness.
Robert Winston
#57. My whole theory for the improvement of society is based on a belief in the discipline and the education of the individual to self-control and right doing, for the sake of right doing. I have never seen fundamental improvements imposed from the top by ordinances and laws.
Ida Tarbell
#58. As the guardian of our rights, the Supreme Court makes decisions every year which either protect the individual or leave him at the mercy of more powerful forces in our society.
Herb Kohl
#59. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.
Albert Einstein
#60. Government has no right to control individual liberty beyond what is necessary to the safety and well-being of society. Such is the boundary which separates the power of the government and the liberty of the citizen or subject in the political state.
John C. Calhoun
#61. The public has a vital stake in natural resources, Jim, such as iron ore. The public can't remain indifferent to reckless, selfish waste by an anti-social individual. After all, private property is a trusteeship held for the benefit of society as a whole.
Ayn Rand
#62. The role of the teacher remains the highest calling of a free people. To the teacher, America entrusts her most precious resource, her children; and asks that they be prepared ... to face the rigors of individual participation in a democratic society.
Shirley Hufstedler
#63. I think something innate in us understands that seeking the good of society is usually best for the individual as well. Humankind is noble, when we give it the chance to be. That nobility is something that exists independent of any god's decree.
Brandon Sanderson
#64. Freedom is valued in a culture that wants to encourage dissent and to stimulate originality and independence. It belongs to a society which is open to change, and which esteems the agent of change, the individual, above its own peace of mind.
Jacob Bronowski
#66. Wherever the Bible has been consistently applied, it has dramatically changed the civilization and culture of those who have accepted its teaching. No other book has ever so dramatically changed the individual lives and society in general.
John F. Walvoord
#67. One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.
Robert Musil
#68. Society flourishes when and only when its molecular unit, the family, flourishes. We know that lasting improvement comes only in the small increments produced by individuals adhering to the simple rules of life ...
George Will
#69. Since the individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining, the average man must take to daydreaming.
Gore Vidal
#70. A reactionary is someone who wants to return to a previous state - that's never a possibility in my books. For me, everything's irreversible in the life of a society, as well as an individual's.
Michel Houellebecq
#71. The well-being of individual persons in any society varies inversely with the money at the disposal of the political class.
Edmund A. Opitz
#72. The individual is not accountable to society for his actions in so far as these concern the interests of no person but himself.
John Stuart Mill
#73. Individual talent is too sporadic and unpredictable to be allowed any important part in the organization society. Social systems which endure are built on the average person who can be trained to occupy any position adequately if not brilliantly.
Stuart Chase
#74. Many an individual has turned from the mean, personal, acquisitive point of view to one that sees society as a whole and works for its benefit. If there has been such a change in one person, there can be the same change in many.
Mahatma Gandhi
#75. The traitor of other races is generally confined to the mediocre or irresponsible individual, but, unfortunately, the traitors among the Negro race are generally to be found among the men with the highest place in education and society, the fellows who call themselves leaders.
Marcus Garvey
#76. The individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining.
Gore Vidal
#77. Having the benefit to our society, not only here in the United States but throughout the world with the amount of invention you get from having a space program, is well worth the risk that an individual like myself has to take by flying in the vehicle.
Mark Kelly
#78. The conclusion, therefore, is that there are two major forces in society: love, which multiplies the species, and the nose, which subordinates it to the individual. Procreation, equilibrium.
Machado De Assis
#79. We cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don't matter at all.
Malcolm Gladwell
#80. Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience.
George Santayana
#81. The symbolism - and the substantive significance - of planting a tree has universal power in every culture and every society on Earth, and it is a way for individual men, women and children to participate in creating solutions for the environmental crisis.
Al Gore
#82. In the technotronic society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
#83. The difference between a heel and a coward and one who jumps in the fire and one who runs away from the fire; is up to the individual in how they manage a given situation.
Stephen Richards
#84. The most important element of a free society, where individual rights are held in the highest esteem, is the rejection of the initiation of violence.
Ron Paul
#85. I'm humbled and enormously grateful to be connected to [Franz] Kafka in a any way. He is one of the writers I admire. I think he has been a big influence on me. I appreciate the idea of the individual person battling the society - which is true in all his books.
Alan Lightman
#86. Each individual of the society has a right to be protected by it in the enjoyment of his life, liberty, and property, according to standing laws.
John Adams
#87. All other things held constant, to the extent that an individual or society sees, believes in, and acts in abundance, so will it have wealth and happiness.
David Cameron Gikandi
#88. A great revolution in just one single individual will help achieve a change in the destiny of a society and, further, will enable a change in the destiny of humankind.
Daisaku Ikeda
#89. You can never really understand an individual unless you also understand the society,historical time period in which they live,personal troubles, and social issues
C. Wright Mills
#90. In a sane society no woman would be left to struggle on her own with the huge transformation that is motherhood, when a single individual finds herself joined by an invisible umbilical cord to another person from whom she will never be separated, even by death.
Germaine Greer
#91. I only want to work with transparent ideas and accessible technologies that 'spotlight' the individual's role in society through creativity. I try to live an open-source life.
Chris Jordan
#92. Put together all the existing families and you have society. It is as simple as that. Whatever kind of training took place in the individual family will be reflected in the kind of society that these families create.
Virginia Satir
#93. Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It's the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe.
Philip Guston
#94. In baseball you have individual responsibility, and if you fail it, you get an error. But at the same time, your focus is on the common goal of the team to win. This is part of what resonates with people about baseball. This is how they would like society to work.
Jed S. Rakoff
#95. Society is just a structure with no soul. The soul is of the individual. One individual outweighs all societies. And, one individual's revolution outweighs all revolutions in the whole of history, because one man can become the womb for God to be reborn.
Rajneesh
#96. The individual can maintain himself in a society definitely organized only through possessing an equally definite mental and moral constitution. This is what the neuropath lacks. His state of disturbance causes him to be constantly taken by surprise by circumstances.
Emile Durkheim
#97. We need a new kind of citizenship, so that we can see citizens as themselves earning the rank of patriot because of their involvement in their community affairs ... We as a society need to be encouraging people to focus not just on individual wants but on serving the larger community.
Paul Wellstone
#98. History records the large events or the general condition of society, but only an individual can put down the way of life in a small town ...
Gladys Taber
#99. Education has to be welcomed as a Spiritual Practice for the establishment of Peace in the individual heart as well as in society including the human commonwealth.
Sai Baba
#100. History shows, in my opinion, that no nation can survive the tension, conflict and antagonism of two competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; it is a curse for a society to be bilingual.
Richard Lamm
