Individual Quotes

No one has a right to obstruct another exercising his faculties innocently for the relief of sensibilities made a part of his nature.

Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike.

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.

All forms of government symbolize an immortal government, common to all dynasties and independent of numbers, perfect where two men exist, perfect where there is only one man.

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.

Each individual has a universal responsibility to shape institutions to serve human needs.

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.

Individual liberty and interdependence are both essential for life in society.

The only justifiable purpose of political institutions is to ensure the unhindered development of the individual.

The merit of those who fill a space in the world's history, who are borne forward, as it were, by the weight of thousands whom they lead, shed a perfume less sweet than do the sacrifices of private virtue.

What is true of every member of the society, individually, is true of them all collectively; since the rights of the whole can be no more than the sum of the rights of the individuals.

An individual, thinking himself injured, makes more noise than a State.

The real genius to make a marketplace flourish doesn't come from the government. It comes from the individual genius of its people.

Socialism is the phantastic younger brother of despotism, which it wants to inherit. Socialism wants to have the fullness of state force which before only existed in despotism. ... However, it goes further than anything in the past because it aims at the formal destruction of the individual ... who ... can be used to improve communities by an expedient organ of government.

Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.

It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million of human beings, collected together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately.

But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth.

The creation of a more peaceful and happier society has to begin from the level of the individual, and from there it can expand to one's family, to one's neighborhood, to one's community and so on.

Cowardice in a race, as in an individual, is the unpardonable sin.

The Attainment of freedom, whether for a person, a nation or a world, must be in exact proportion to the attainment of nonviolence for each

Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us.

The feeling for what ought and ought not to be grows and dies like a tree, and no fertilizer of any kind will do much good. What the individual can do is give a fine example, and have the courage to firmly uphold ethical convictions in a society of cynics. I have for a long time tried to conduct myself this way, with varying success.

This American government - what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will.

The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.

The soldier is the army.

We continue to recognize the greater ability of some to earn more than others. But we do assert that the ambition of the individual to obtain for him a proper security is an ambition to be preferred to the appetite for great wealth and great power.

A free citizen in a free state, it seems to me, has an inalienable right to play with whomsoever he will, so long as he does not disturb the general peace. If any other citizen, offended by the spectacle, makes a pother, then that other citizen, and not the man exercising his inalienable right, should be put down by the police.

And each man stands with his face in the light. Of his own drawn sword, ready to do what a hero can.

It is character that counts in a nation as in a man.

...nothing at all rides on the life or death of the individual.

The lessons we have begun to learn make me hopeful, that human beings will become friendlier, more harmonious, less harmful. Compassion and the seeds of peace will be able to flourish. At the same time, every individual is responsible to help guide our global family in the right direction. Good wishes alone are not enough; we have to take responsibility. Large human movements spring from individual human initiatives

One man with courage is a majority.

The duties are even more important than the rights; and in the long run I think that the reward is ampler and greater for duty well done, than for the insistence upon individual rights.

The individual has always to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.

I wish my countrymen to consider that whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can ever commit the leastact of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it. A government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will at length even become the laughing-stock of the world.

In war it is not men, but the man who counts.

It takes place, by and large, with the same sort of necessity as a tree brings forth fruit, and demands of the world no more than a soil on which the individual can flourish.

If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience.

Great changes start with individuals; the basis of world peace is inner peace in the hearts of individuals.

There is, fortunately, a minority composed of those who recognize early in their lives that the most beautiful and satisfying experiences open to humankind are not derived from the outside, but are bound up with the development of the individual's own feeling, thinking and acting. The genuine artists, investigators and thinkers have always been persons of this kind. However inconspicuously the life of these individuals runs its course, none the less the fruits of their endeavors are the most valuable contributions which one generation can make to its successors.

In a government bottomed on the will of all, the... liberty of every individual citizen becomes interesting to all.

The individual is the central, rarest, most precious capital resource of our society.

... Societies aren t made of sticks and stones, but of men whose individual characters, by turning the scale one way or another, determine the direction of the whole.

Alike for the nation and the individual, the one indispensable requisite is character.

I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride.

For, in order to turn the individual into a function of the State, his dependence on anything beside the State must be taken from him.

Peace is normally a great good, and normally it coincides with righteousness, but it is righteousness and not peace which should bind the conscience of a nation as it should bind the conscience of an individual; and neither a nation nor an individual can surrender conscience to another's keeping.

Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.

Man, not men, is the most important consideration.

What we really need the poet's and orator's I help to keep alive in us is not, then, the common and gregarious courage which Robert Shaw showed when he marched with you, men of the Seventh Regiment. It is that more lonely courage which he showed when he dropped his warm commission in the glorious Second to head your dubious fortunes, negroes of the Fifty-fourth. That lonely kind of courage (civic courage as we call it in times of peace) is the kind of valor to which the monuments of nations should most of all be reared.

Each of us has the potential to contribute... You have a great opportunity to make a new shape of the world.

It is both foolish and wicked to teach the average man who is not well off that some wrong or injustice has been done him, and that he should hope for redress elsewhere than in his own industry, honesty, and intelligence.

The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism.

Just as ripples spread out when a single pebble is dropped into water, the actions of individuals can have far-reaching effects.

The foundation of the world lies in the nation. The foundation of the nation lies in the family. The foundation of the family lies in the individual.

What is true of the individual will be tomorrow true of the whole nation if individuals will but refuse to lose heart and hope.

A few heart-whole, sincere, and energetic men and women can do more in a year than a mob in a century.

The equal rights of man and the happiness of every individual are now acknowledged to be the only legitimate objects of government.

The psychopathology of the masses is rooted in the psychology of the individual

Law is often the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.