#individualism

I didn't want to be in the teeming mass of the working class.[...] I didn't want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape - but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community - to society? ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#industrialisation #society #working-class #dreams

The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#justice #politics #rights #nature

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

— Joe Biden

#common #community #individualism #long #over

The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand. The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism. ↗

— Paul Ryan

#ayn #ayn rand #collectivism #credit #fight

Man is an end in himself. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#life #objectivism #philosophy #success #life

Who would you be but who you are? ↗

— Terry Brooks

#fantasy #individualism #fantasy

It's not just that people sacrifice their love relationships, and the care of their children, to pursue their careers. Something like this has perhaps always existed. The point is that today many people feel called to do this, feel they ought to do this, feel their lives would be somehow wasted or unfulfilled if they didn't do it. ↗

— Charles Taylor

#love

Everything he admired or loved had been the product of intense individualism. ...when had mass philosophies ever brought benefit or wisdom? ↗

— John le Carré

#philosophy #wisdom #love

But, of course, what mattered most of all was my deep-seated hatred of authority, my monstrous individualism, my lawlessness. No word in my vocabulary expressed deeper hatred than the word INTERFERENCE. But Christianity placed at the centre what then seemed to me a transcendental Interferer. If its picture were true then no sort of 'treaty with reality' could ever be possible. There was no region even in the innermost depth of one's soul (nay, there least of all) which one could surround with a barbed wire fence and guard with a notice No Admittance. And that was what I wanted; some area, however small, of which I could say to all other beings, 'This is my business and mine only. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#christianity #god #individualism #morality #business

The first duty of a man is to think for himself ↗

— José Martí

#democracy #freedom #history #hope #individualism