#duality

One thing I've learned in life is that I can speak for myself, that I can fight my own battles. I don't like anyone telling me how I'm supposed to feel or think or what I'm supposed to say. ↗

— Hope Solo

#free-spirited #individuality #leadership #outspoken #resiliency

The present representative of the Dedlocks is an excellent master. He supposes all his dependents to be utterly bereft of individual characters, intentions, or opinions, and is persuaded that he was born to supersede the necessity of their having any. If he were to make a discovery to the contrary, he would be simply stunned — would never recover himself, most likely, except to gasp and die. ↗

— Charles Dickens

#independence #individuality #leadership #submission #suppression

The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time. ↗

— John Stuart Mill

#creativity #individuality #courage

We have many cases of men committing suicide rather than face their own individuality. I know of no case of a woman who committed suicide because she was gay. ↗

— George Weinberg

#case #cases #committed #committing #face

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. ↗

— Rudyard Kipling

#business

To be a jazz freedom fighter is to attempt to galvanize and energize world-weary people into forms of organization with accountable leadership that promote critical exchange and broad reflection. The interplay of individuality and unity is not one of uniformity and unanimity imposed from above but rather of conflict among diverse groupings that reach a dynamic consensus subject to questioning and criticism. As with a soloist in a jazz quartet, quintet or band, individuality is promoted in order to sustain and increase the creative tension with the group--a tension that yields higher levels of performance to achieve the aim of the collective project. ↗

— Cornel West

#critical-reflection #improve #individuality #jazz #jazz-freedom-fighter

The fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a greater danger to the privacy of the individual. ↗

— Earl Warren

#computers #e-mail #individuality #internet #prediction

The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in. ↗

— James Baldwin

#individuality #inspirational-quotes #life #life-lessons #courage

For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that — either now or in the uncertain future — patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable." [The Eternal Value of Privacy, May 18, 2006] ↗

— Bruce Schneier

#freedom #individuality #liberty #observation #privacy

If little else, the brain is an educational toy. The problem with possessing such an engaging toy is that other people want to play with it, too. Sometime they'd rather play with yours than theirs. Or they object if you play with yours in a different manner from the way they play with theirs. The result is, a few games out of a toy department of possibilities are universally and endlessly repeated. If you don't play some people's game, they say that you have "lost your marbles," not recognizing that, while Chinese checkers is indeed a fine pastime, a person may also play dominoes, chess, strip poker, tiddlywinks, drop-the-soap or Russian roulette with his brain. ↗

— Tom Robbins

#creativity #deviance #games #individuality #normalizing