Individualism Quotes

“Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander.”

“I exist," murmurs someone whose name is Everyone. "I'm young and in love; I am old and I want rest; I work, I prosper, I do good business, I have houses to rent, money in State Securities; I am happy, I have wife and children; I like all these things and I want to go on living, so leave me alone."... There are moments when all this casts a deep chill on the large-minded pioneers of the human race.”

“The antidote to this abuse of formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual.”

“The vision of the anointed is one in which ills as poverty, irresponsible sex, and crime derive primarily from 'society,' rather than from individual choices and behavior. To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by 'society'.”

“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.”

“The freedom of America is the freedom to live your own life and take your own chances.”

“The very reason why we object to state ownership, that it puts a stop to individual initiative and to the healthy development of personal responsibility, is the reason why we object to an unsupervised, unchecked monopolistic control in private hands. We urge control and supervision by the nation as an antidote to the movement for state socialism. Those who advocate total lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism.”

“I am an American; free born and free bred, where I acknowledge no man as my superior, except for his own worth, or as my inferior, except for his own demerit.”

“However widespread the desire to be free, that is wholly different from a desire to live in a society where others are free.”

“We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did.”

“We can just as little afford to follow the doctrinaires of an extreme individualism as the doctrinaires of an extreme socialism.”

“There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.”

“I fear the popular notion of success stands in direct opposition in all points to the real and wholesome success. One adores public opinion, the other, private opinion; one, fame, the other, desert; one, feats, the other, humility; one, lucre, the other, love; one, monopoly, and the other, hospitality of mind.”

“It is surely time for men to think for themselves, and to throw off the authority of names so artificially magnified.”

“Natural rights are those which always appertain to man in right of his existence. Of this kind are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, and also all those rights of acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness, which are not injurious to the rights of others.”

“Everyone must act according to the dictates of his own reason.”

“Human society is made up of partialities. Each citizen has an interest and a view of his own, which, if followed out to the extreme, would leave no room for any other citizen.”

“The reader, the booklover, must meet his own needs without paying too much attention to what his neighbors say those needs should be.”

“One's days were too brief to take the burden of another's errors on one's shoulders. Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it.”

“There are many well-meaning people today who work at placing an economic floor beneath all of us so that no one shall exist below a certain level or standard of living, and certainly we don't quarrel with this. But look more closely and you may find that all too often these well-meaning people are building a ceiling above which no one shall be permitted to climb and between the two are pressing us all into conformity, into a mold of standardized mediocrity.”

“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.”

“There comes a time in each man's education in which he comes to the conclusion that envy is ignorance, imitation is suicide, and society in in conspiracy against each one of its members.”

“To educate the wise man, the State exists; and with the appearance of the wise man, the State expires. The appearance of charactermakes the state unnecessary. The wise man is the State.”

“With freedom goes responsibility, a responsibility that can only be met by the individual himself.”

“Freedom, individualism and being yourself so long as you don't hurt another's physical person or property: The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself.”