#individualism

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

Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle. ↗

— Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

#democracy #freedom #history #hope #individualism

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

To live in any true sense of the word is to reject others; to accept them, one must be able to renounce, to do oneself violence, to act against one's own nature, to weaken oneself; we conceive freedom only for ourselves - we extend it to our neighbours only at the cost of exhausting efforts; whence the precariousness of liberalism, a defiance of our instincts, a brief and miraculous success, a state of exception, at the antipodes of our deepest imperatives. ↗

— Emil Cioran

#individuality #liberalism #philosophy #freedom

Freedom is the realization that it is sufficient to simply be a human being. ↗

— Bryant McGill

#importance #individualism #simplicity #freedom

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#self-reliance #self-trust #life

We hear a lot about identity theft when someone takes your wallet and pretends to be you and uses your credit cards. But the more serious identity theft is to get swallowed up in other people's definition of you. ↗

— Stephen R. Covey

#individualism #success #life