Quotes about Individualism

America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. It's 'winner take nothing' that is the great truth of our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. Our fate is to become one, and yet many -- This in not prophecy, but description.

You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go.

All I know is, if you listen to society, you'll never get anywhere!

The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.  

Committee - A group of men who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done.  

Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.

I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

"Why is it so important--what others have done? Why does it become sacred by the mere fact of not being your own? Why is anyone and everyone right--so long as it's not yourself? Why does the number of those others take the place of truth? Why is truth made a mere matter or arithmetic--and only of addition at that? Why is everything twisted out of all sense to fit everything else? There must be some reason. I don't know. I've never known it. I'd like to understand."

--Howard Roark

The fallacy of modern atomistic individualism is of course not just our "tabula rasa" self-deception but also our ego-mythical "social contract":  if every member of modern society is supposed autonomously and privately to think through for himself the most vital and fundamental (normative, evaluative, principled) issues of his life -- i.e. to undertake primal self-formation utterly on his own and outside the purview of parents/peers/education/media etc. -- then of course the vast majority will never advance past point A or B, whatever is most obvious, blatant, and simplistic.  Expecting moderns to be radically "self-creative" when their culture systematically strips them of all concrete cultural content that might act as soulish or spiritual alphabets, is expecting fleas to jump when their legs have been cut off.  Ex nihilo nihil fit, out of nothing nothing is going to get produced:  humans require raw materials, they require means and tools and techniques and instructions as well as a repertory of ends, principles, values, teleological orientations, hierarchies of perspectives, etc..  If anyone wants to know where such an unholy and vast mass of aborted personalities came from in modern society (the modern Many), one virtually has to look no further than the vacuous or abstractivist code that deprives all of them of cultural traction and grit, and encourages their doulic lethargy and their banausic materialism.

No society can possibly be built on a denial of individual freedom.

It is the cruelest of all ironies that moderns imagine themselves to be (abstractly understood) "individuals," because in actuality moderns are "types," abstracted and self-abstractive victims of a process of stereotyping that afflicts even would-be rebels and anarchists.

What we actually learn from trying to carry out the program of philosophical education or teaching in the humanities or liberal arts (no matter how it may be done or via what materials), is demonstrably a lesson in diversification:  if there is anything "universalist" or "uniformitarian" about human nature, it defies being evidenced.  Students as individuals and as groups are very differentially susceptible to learning the arts of self-mastery and self-criticism:  if every human being were equitably competent to penetrate and discompose his own illusions and delusions, not just philosophy classes but education at large would be mostly superfluous.  People in general could just sit and think for themselves. 

Acknowledging our inner divinity as a step on the path to embodying it is not to be confused with narcissism or individualism, since we must further admit that everyone’s divine birthright is the same limitless creational potential of unconditional love.

The straight line is godless and
immoral. The straight line is not a creative line, it is a duplicating line, an imitating
line.

We are the universe pretending to be individuals.

Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the man who disagrees. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to swim with the current. But the creator is the man who goes against the current. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone.
~Howard Roark

The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.

Liberty is not collective, it is personal. All liberty is individual liberty.

"Consider the matter dispassionately, Mr. Foster, and you will see that no offence is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behaviour. Murder kills only the individual-- and after all, wha is an individual? ". . . ." We can make a new one with the greatest of ease-- as many as we like. Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself."