#dualism

What I was suddenly aware of was the importance of their being whatever each of them was---cocky and contemptuous, or bothered and beaten---as long as it was something they'd come to in their own way: the importance of being human, in fact. The peace and harmony Uncle Ian and the others claimed to be handing out in fact was death, because without being yourself, an individual, you weren't really alive. ↗

— John Christopher

#death

I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I'm beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. My story isn't pleasant, it's not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves. ↗

— Hermann Hesse

#dreams

If you want to be a slave in life, then continue going around asking others to do for you. They will oblige, but you will find the price is your choices, your freedom, your life itself. They will do for you, and as a result you will be in bondage to them forever, having given your identity away for a paltry price. Then, and only then, you will be a nobody, a slave, because you yourself and nobody else made it so. ↗

— Terry Goodkind

#freedom #individualism #power #slave #freedom

Here beyond men's judgments all covenants were brittle. ↗

— Cormac McCarthy

#freedom #frontier #individualism #justice #liberalism

Writing of only one small part of the broader problem, namely the single-minded pursuit of individualistic 'rights,' [Don] Feder is not wrong to conclude: Absent a delicate balance--rights and duties, freedom and order--the social fabric begins to unravel. The rights explosion of the past three decades has taken us on a rapid descent to a culture without civility, decency, or even that degree of discipline necessary to maintain an advanced industrial civilization. Our cities are cesspools, our urban schools terrorist training camps, our legislatures brothels where rights are sold to the highest electoral bidder. ↗

— D.A. Carson

#freedom #individualism #rights #the-twentieth-century #freedom

Creation from chaos is natural. We've come to a place where we've realized that we have this actual physical need to create things. We've discovered that we hate people en masse, we're sick of homogenized culture, and these realizations have left holes in our hearts. We create to fill those holes, to be able to sleep at night knowing we've done something, even a small something, to confront the manufactured culture that is currently being churned out. ↗

— Renee Rigdon Zabet Stewart

#art #arts-and-crafts #craft #crafts #individualism

What is a drop of rain, compared to the storm? What is a thought, compared to the mind? Our unity is full of wonder which your tiny individualism cannot even conceive. ↗

— Ken Levine

#unity #unity

All rational action is in the first place individual action. Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons. Only the individual acts. ↗

— Ludwig von Mises

#economics

I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#individualism #libertarianism #objectivism #selfishness #selfishness

Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism. ↗

— Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

#democracy #freedom #history #hope #individualism