Individuality Quotes

But society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal Impulses and preferences.

John Stuart Mill

The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.

Marcel Duchamp

America is not anything if it consists of each of us. It is something only if it consists of all of us.

Woodrow Wilson

The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole.

Bernard Devoto

Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way peace and security which he can not find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.

Albert Einstein

Only at his maximum does an individual surpass all his derivative elements, and become purely himself. And most people never get there. In his own pure individuality a man surpasses his father and mother, and is utterly unknown to them.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

If mankind had not embedded itself, with the momentum of centuries and the passion of habit, in the id

Soren Kierkegaard, The Journals

If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.

Henry David Thoreau

Except in a few well-publicized instances (enough to lend credence to the iconography painted on the walls of the media), the rigorous practice of rugged individualism usually leads to poverty, ostracism and disgrace. The rugged individualist is too often mistaken for the misfit, the maverick, the spoilsport, the sore thumb.

Lewis H. Lapham

Do not wish to be anything but what you are, and try to be that perfectly.

St. Francis De Sales

It is said that if Noah's ark had to be built by a company; they would not have laid the keel yet; and it may be so. What is many men's business is nobody's business. The greatest things are accomplished by individual men.

C. H. (Charles Haddon) Spurgeon

There is a war against the individual.

James Dye

when you are surrounded by sheep then it is easy to become one yourself.

Stephen Richards

By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State

Ian McEwan, A Move Abroad, prefa

Comrades! We must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all.

Nikita Khrushchev

Follow your own star!

Dante Alighieri

Once you admit that the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of a higher entity called society or the nation, most of those features of totalitarian regimes which horrify us follow of necessity. From the collectivist standpoint, intolerance and brutal suppression of dissent, the complete disregard of the life and happiness of the individual, are essential and unavoidable consequences of this basic premise; and the collectivist can admit this and at the same time claim that his system is superior to one in which the

Friedrich A. Hayek

I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet.

Mahatma Gandhi