Top 100 The Individual Quotes
#1. The cult of the individual is killing us. I think Twitter signals the death of western civilisation, but people have been saying that since Demosthenes.
Kate Atkinson
#2. As a confirmed individualist I certainly do not wish to underrate the influence of the individual, for the masses do not lead the individual; rather, in the individual is vested the capacity to lead the masses.
Gustav Stresemann
#3. Bipartisan democracy presupposes the individual, whose welfare is identical with that of the community in which he lives, the absence of coherent social classes, a basic uniformity of interest throughout.
Learned Hand
#4. In the first period religious life appears as a form of discipline which the individual or a whole people must accept as an unconditional command without any rational understanding of the ultimate meaning and purpose of that command.
Muhammad Iqbal
#5. As to the American tradition of non-meddling, Anarchism asks that it be carried down to the individual himself.
Voltairine De Cleyre
#6. I care more about making sure the story is correct and the characters are behaving in character than I do about the individual jokes.
Michael Schur
#7. He really meant to tell them that the big money was not in the individual fluctuations but in the main movements that is, not in reading the tape but in sizing up the entire market and its trend.
Jesse Lauriston Livermore
#8. Is being single hard? It depends where your mind is. If you are focused, being single is an enjoyable experience, but if you hate being alone, you'll hate being single. I think it depends on the individual are where they are in life.
Lauren London
#9. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally short-sighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations ...
C. G. Jung
#10. The best system of education is that which draws its chief support from the voluntary effort of the community, from the individual efforts of citizens, and from those burdens of taxation which they voluntarily impose upon themselves.
James A. Garfield
#12. Both bad driving and bad voting are dangerous not merely to the individual who practices them, but to innocent bystanders.
Bryan Caplan
#13. Tantric Zen is for the individual who is in love with both the finite and the infinite, who gets a kick out of this weird transitory world and at the same time, wants to step beyond it.
Frederick Lenz
#14. Landlords grow rich in their sleep without working, risking or economizing. The increase in the value of land, arising as it does from the efforts of an entire community, should belong to the community and not to the individual who might hold title.
John Stuart Mill
#15. Crime against the individual is the equivalent of crime against humanity.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
#16. Institutions provide procedures through which human conduct is patterned, compelled to go, in grooves deemed desirable by society. And this trick is performed by making these grooves appear to the individual as the only possible ones.
Peter L. Berger
#17. Bilingualism for the individual is fine, but not for a country.
S.I. Hayakawa
#18. Small business, right down to the individual can beat big, bureaucratic companies ten times out of ten.
John Naisbitt
#19. Optimism is an essential ingredient of innovation. How else can the individual welcome change over security, adventure over staying in safe places?
Robert Noyce
#20. Liberals worry that what's best for the individual might not be better for the public at large. But that philosophy assumes something vicious about each and every one of us. It assumes we only care about ourselves.
Allen West
#21. But the individual butterfly or earthquake remains just the unique existence which it is. We forget in explaining its occurrence that it is only the occurrence that is explained, not the thing itself.
John Dewey
#22. In the sphere of natural investigation, as in poetry and painting, the delineation of that which appeals most strongly to the imagination, derives its collective interest from the vivid truthfulness with which the individual features are portrayed.
David Hume
#23. I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn't agree with Bly that it's a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well, and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention.
James Laughlin
#24. Culture arises only when the individual fulfills his cycle of obligations. If everyone recognizes and fulfills his cycle of obligations, genuineness emerges. The culture of a whole nation can in the final analysis be built upon nothing else.
Kathe Kollwitz
#25. The individual produces an object and, by consuming it, returns to himself, but returns as a productive and self reproducing individual. Consumption thus appears as a moment of production.
Karl Marx
#26. But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts.
Ayn Rand
#27. Hunger, love, pain, fear are some of those inner forces which rule the individual's instinct for self preservation.
Albert Einstein
#28. But egoism is more than this. It is the realization by the individual that he is above all institutions and all formulas; that they exist only so far as he chooses to make them his own by accepting them.
John Buchanan Robinson
#29. I think the hero in our generation is not the individual but the pair, two people who together add up to more than they are apart.
Theodore Zeldin
#30. What was the right level of prosperity, the level that banished dire need but did not satiate, the level that did not threaten the artist in the individual? And how did one stop when one arrived at it?
Nayantara Sahgal
#31. Two things are necessary, the development of individuality and the participation of the individual in a truly social life.
Maria Montessori
#32. Every American election summons the individual voter to weigh the past against the future.
Theodore H. White
#33. We do not support the man. We do not support the individual. We support the idea of independent revolution in the Western Hemisphere, free from American intervention
Lee Harvey Oswald
#34. The State must act as the guardian of a millennial future in the face of which the wishes and the selfishness of the individual must appear as nothing and submit.
Adolf Hitler
#35. The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought.
Albert Einstein
#36. I think it's important for us to believe in one another's capabilities. If I didn't have someone to believe in me, I wouldn't be the individual I am today. Neither would I strive for new territory or new direction or to believe in myself.
Usher
#37. Anything that shifts power from the individual judgment of free citizens to government is a bad thing.
Mark Steyn
#38. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
Milan Kundera
#39. What I believe ... about more sleep than is needful concerns the individual who goes far beyond the need, developing slothful and lazy habits, which deaden the senses and become a retarder of accomplishment. To overcome these things in life requires discipline and restraint.
Alvin R. Dyer
#40. The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters - not to talk in armies and nations and numbers - but to track it home.
D.H. Lawrence
#41. The liberation cannot be reached but by means of the perception of the identity of the individual spirit with the universal spirit.
Laozi
#42. Nevertheless, it is the free grace of the resurrected One that now also goes after the individual, overcomes the doubter, and creates in him the Easter faith.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#43. Don't marry the person you think you can live with; marry only the individual you think you can't live without.
James Dobson
#44. Now he learned what law and order and truth are, what consent and harmony mean; how the individual may find his own end in a higher end, where law and freedom mean the same thing, and the purest certainty exists without the slightest constraint.
George MacDonald
#45. At bottom, the battle has been waged on moral grounds. The country has debated whether a society for which the dignity of the individual is the supreme value can, without a fundamental inconsistency, follow the practice of deliberately putting one of its members to death.
William J. Brennan
#46. ...the fight that political philosophers have always identified as the central conflict in human history: that between the individual and society. Thus far, scholars have shown little interest in finding this conflict in American history...
Thaddeus Russell
#47. 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
#48. A great deal of thought is only a substitute for the thoughts that the individual would really find useful at the time.
Idries Shah
#49. Men hate the individual whom they call avaricious only because nothing can be gained from him.
Voltaire
#50. The individual writer is a lonely figure in the wilderness of agents, editors, chain bookstores, and dwindling numbers of independents. The stronger MWA can be, the better it can serve us, and the more respect it can bring to bear in dealing with the problems most of us face every day.
Charles Todd
#51. For Stirner, the social axiom of conservative, liberal, and socialist schools of political thought alike is in itself repressive: it disguises as potentially redemptive an order whose central function is inhibitory of the individual's interests.
John Carroll
#52. The elimination of the fear of death transforms the individual's way of being in the world.
Stanislav Grof
#53. There is nothing settled in manners, but the laws of behavior yield to the energy of the individual.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#54. Religion, by teaching man his relationship to God, gives the individual a sense of his own dignity and teaches him to respect himself by respecting his neighbors.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#55. The individual disposition is already a factor in childhood; it is innate, and not acquired in the course of a life.
Carl Jung
#56. Here is life's essential purpose - to worship God in spirit and in truth (see John 4:24). All other purposes are meant to be secondary. When they become primary, they destroy the individual.
Ravi Zacharias
#57. The individual - stupendous and beautiful paradox - is at once infinitesimal dust and the cause of all things.
C.V. Wedgwood
#58. In the eyes of God all men, indeed all creatures, may be equal: but the divine law of the individual is to maintain and to defend his individuality.
Houston Stewart Chamberlain
#59. The general tendency of evolution is from structure to function, from bondage to freedom of the individual elements.
Boris Sidis
#60. 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
#61. The remission to Abu Bakar Bashir is not a reflection on the individual per se rather than the application of the remission program, which is applied in general.
Marty Natalegawa
#62. It's the work that's important, not the individual who does it.
Gregory Maguire
#63. It takes no compromise to give people their rights ... it takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no political deal to give people freedom. It takes no survey to remove repression.
Harvey Milk
#64. The source of all the problems in the world is ignorance - the limited view point or narrow mindedness or the conditioned state of mind. As the individual learn the fundamental truths of life and move up in the scale of life, to that extent his/her ignorance go away and become open/free.
Thomas Vazhakunnathu
#65. Not allowing people to go through their pain, and protecting them from it, may turn out to be a kind of over-protection, which in turn implies a certain lack of respect for the integrity and the intrinsic nature and the future development of the individual.
Abraham H. Maslow
#66. What changes with fame is the perceptions of the individual rather than the individual.
Julia Roberts
#67. The individual protests against the world, but he doesn't get beyond protest, he is just a single protester. When he wants to be more than that, he has to counter power with power, he has to oppose the system with another system.
Friedrich Durrenmatt
#68. All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude, and the emergence of this consciousness is always hampered by the predominance of needs and satisfactions which, to a great extent, have become the individual's own.
Herbert Marcuse
#69. What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
William James
#71. Thus the great drama of universal life is perpetually sustained; and though the individual actors undergo continual change, the same parts are ever filled by another and another generation; renewing the face of the earth, and the bosom of the deep, with endless successions of life and happiness.
William Buckland
#72. The valuable person in any business is the individual who can and will cooperate with others.
Elbert Hubbard
#73. The tendencies of the times favor the idea of self-government, and leave the individual, for all code, to the rewards and penalties of his own constitution, which work with more energy than we believe, whilst we depend on artificial restraints.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#74. Mass Man, the universal psychopath, is born when the individual ego is weakened to the point at which it loses separate identity and is forced, for security, to merge with the mass.
Robert M. Lindner
#75. The individual cannot exist outside of the many spheres of the deeply interconnected webs of life
Bryant McGill
#76. A crime is born in the gap between the morality of society and that of the individual.
Hakan Nesser
#77. Man is free Woyzeck. Man is the ultimate expression of the individual urge to freedom.
Georg Buchner
#78. What do you mean by sound government?'
Good public order, no corruption in high places, freedom from fear and war and crime, a reasonably equitable distribution of wealth and resources, concern for the individual life.'
Then we haven't got sound government.
P.D. James
#79. I'm for the individual as opposed to the corporation. The way it is the individual is the underdog, and with all the things a corporation has going for them the individual comes out banged on her head. The artist is nothing. It's really tragic.
Marilyn Monroe
#80. [There is] a duty in refusing to cooperate in any undertaking that violates the Constitutional rights of the individual. This holds in particular for all inquisitions that are concerned with the private life and the political affiliations of the citizens.
Albert Einstein
#81. There's a whole group of Christians who believe the individual is more important, but in the end I don't think that's what Christ was talking about.
Lewis Black
#82. That un-American institution, the trades union, has developed its un-American principle of curtailing or abolishing the personal freedom of the individual in a new direction, that of seeking, as far as possible, to cripple the World's Fair.
Erik Larson
#83. The tendency of organization is to kill out the spirit which gave it birth. Organizations do not protect the sacredness of the individual; their tendency is to sink the individual in the mass, to sacrifice his rights, and to immolate him on the altar of some fancied good.
Angelina Grimke
#84. Art for me ... is a negation of society, an affirmation of the individual, outside of all the rules and all the demands of society.
Emile Zola
#85. I think a lot of people have lost respect for the individual, you know, the individual, the person who doesn't conform.
Erykah Badu
#86. Freedom means Freedom for the Group, not Freedom for the Individual. ( ... ) Men must not be slaves to other men, but they must be slaves to their group. For, if they are not slaves to their own group, they will assuredly become slaves to some other.
Liang Qichao
#87. My touchstone for following a line of wisdom is; 'living the philosophy should bring freedom to the individual, and love, wisdom and compassion to society, to our relationships'.
Phil 'Philosofree' Cheney
#88. Love is a trick played on us by the forces of evolution. Pleasure is the bait laid down by the same. There is only power. Power is of the individual mind but the mind's power is not enough. Power of the body decides everything in the end and only might is right.
T.H. White
#89. What thoughts are to the individual, art is to the community as a whole. That's where you reflect on who you are, who you hope to be, what you've gone through, and where you hope to go.
Wendell Pierce
#90. The process of receiving information for me is seeing, hearing, and feeling their energy in my frame of reference. That doesn't mean I see the individual, unfortunately.
John Edward
#91. Education for all seems to be the product of a type of distributive justice that is in no way related to the individual.
Abdoulaye Wade
#92. The self is not the individual body or mind, but rather that aspect deep inside each individual person that knows the truth.
Vishnudevananda Saraswati
#93. Is it true that human beings are nothing but the products of their social environment? And if it is not true, what justification can there be for maintaining that the individual is less important than the group of which he is a member?
Aldous Huxley
#94. Films and gramophone records, music, books and buildings show clearly how vigorously a man's life and work go on after his 'death,' whether we feel it or not, whether we are aware of the individual names or not. There is no such thing as death according to our view!
Martin Bormann
#95. The individual person is more interesting than people in general; he and not they is the one whom God created in His image.
Andre Gide
#96. My fundamental tenets are concerned with freedom of the individual; the market isn't perfect, but it's the best available way of allocating resources.
Niall Ferguson
#97. Freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and assured here than in any other place on earth. The price for this freedom at times has been high, but we have never been unwilling to pay the price.
Ronald Reagan
#98. The transcendent importance of love and goodwill in all human relations is shown by their mighty beneficent effect upon the individual and society.
George David Birkhoff
#99. I believe it's important that we use names of endearment that reflect a special feeling for the individual involved.
Zig Ziglar
#100. And to the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others.
Erving Goffman
