#Individual Quotes

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

“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.”

“I... [am] convinced [man] has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Taxes should be proportioned to what may be annually spared by the individual.”

“One man with courage is a majority.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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 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.”

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

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

“... 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.”

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

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

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

“I believe it to be perfectly possible for an individual to adopt the way of life of the future. . . without having to wait for others to do so.”

“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.”

“A multitude is strong while it holds together, but so soon as each of those who compose it begins ro think of his own private danger, it becomes weak and contemptible.”

“Man, not men, is the most important consideration.”

“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.”

“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.”

“My optimism rests on my belief in the infinite possibilities of the individual to develop nonviolence. . . . In a gentle way you can shake the world.”

“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”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“Life will not be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom, but an oceanic circle whose centre will be the individual.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“The soldier is the army.”