#dualism

When distinction of any kind, even intellectual distinction, is somehow resented as a betrayal of the American spirit of equal opportunity for all, the result must be just this terror of individualistic impulses setting us apart, either above or below our neighbours; just this determination to obey without questioning and to subscribe with passion to the conventions and traditions. The dilemma becomes a very real one: How can this sense of democratic equality be made compatible with respect for exceptional personalities or great minds? How can democracy, as we understand it today, with its iron repression of the free spirit, its monotonous standardisation of everything, learn to cherish an intellectual aristocracy without which any nation runs the risk of becoming a civilisation of the commonplace and the second-rate? ↗

— Harold Edmund Stearns

#civilization #conventions #distinction #equality #individualism

This proves the significance of individualism; being able to face the music, to embrace it, and then create something beautiful from it. You can’t truly be happy unless you’re unhappy sometimes and the pinnacle of life can only be reached when one can carve their own path. ↗

— Nadège Richards

#individualism #life #love #music #path

She smiled. She knew she was dying. But it did not matter any longer. She had known something which no human words could ever tell and she knew it now. She had been awaiting it and she felt it, as if it had been, as if she had lived it. Life had been, if only because she had known it could be, and she felt it now as a hymn without sound, deep under the little whole that dripped red drops into the snow, deeper than that from which the red drops came. A moment or an eternity- did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist. She smiled, her last smile, to so much that had been possible. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#inspirational #life #philosophy #inspirational

The 19th century was the age of Individualism; the 20th and 21st are the ages of Socialism. ↗

— Francis Parker Yockey

#age #ages #century #individualism #socialism

I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete. It's so fuckin' heroic. ↗

— George Carlin

#hero #heroism #individualism #individuality #nature

In the first place, Descartes stands for the most explicit and uncompromising dualism between mind and matter. ↗

— James M. Baldwin

#dualism #explicit #first #matter #mind

For too long in this society, we have celebrated unrestrained individualism over common community. ↗

— Joe Biden

#common #community #individualism #long #over

Standardization of our educational systems is apt to stamp out individualism and defeat the very ends of education by leveling the product down rather than up. ↗

— Harvey Cushing

#defeat #down #education #educational #ends

At his best, Obama promised to work with Republicans to reduce the deficit in a way that honors both individualism and community. ↗

— Ron Fournier

#both #community #deficit #his #honors

Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman. ↗

— Margaret Fuller

#dualism #fact #female #feminine #fluid