I don’t like being told what to do and kissing you-know-what to get up the corporate ladder.

I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.

Like Frank Sinatra, I’m doing it my way.

Drugs are a waste of time. They destroy your memory and your self-respect and everything that goes along with with your self-esteem. They’re no good at all.

Do we not realize that self respect comes with self reliance?

I’m not concerned with your liking or disliking me… All I ask is that you respect me as a human being.

I think everyone should approach relationships from the perspective of playing it straight and giving someone the benefit of the doubt. Until he establishes that this is a game. And if it’s a game, you need to win. The best thing to do is just walk away from the table.

By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.

Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones.

I’m just an individual who doesn’t feel that I need to have somebody qualify my work in any particular way. I’m working for me.

If you want to occupy the C-suite or the top one-tenth of 1% in any organization, you have to be obsessively devoted to your career at the expense of everything else. And women look at that, and they think, ‚No.‘

If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.

I am who I am. That’s why my friends and peers respect and appreciate me. I don’t change or cater my actions to fit my surroundings. I’m myself 24/7. People appreciate that.

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.

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

I hated to be treated as a child. I thought it was the worst situation.

There are certainly a lot of things that still need to change when it comes to women in the workforce.

Children need to get a high-quality education, avoid violence and the criminal-justice system, and gain jobs. But they deserve more. We want them to learn not only reading and math but fairness, caring, self-respect, family commitment, and civic duty.

Base souls have no faith in great individuals.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

There are other measures of self-respect for a man, than the number of clean shirts he puts on every day.

I hate all politics. I don’t like either political party. One should not belong to them – one should be an individual, standing in the middle. Anyone that belongs to a party stops thinking.

The minute you start compromising for the sake of massaging somebody’s ego, that’s it, game over.

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.

I just usually go with my own taste. If I like something, and it happens to be against the law, well, then I might have a problem.

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

I am not a second option person. It is that or nothing. If it is not the way I see it I prefer not to see it.

Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force.

I left the Middle West for Schenectady because the General Electric Company offered me a more congenial, better paying job than did anyone else.

The post of honour is a private station.

Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.

When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet in his private heart no man much respects himself.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

Respect your efforts, respect yourself. Self-respect leads to self-discipline. When you have both firmly under your belt, that’s real power.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

Coaching is nothing more than eliminating mistakes before you get fired.

When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everybody will respect you.

In the West, as well as some other parts of the world, the personal sense of ego tends to predominate, whereas in other areas, there is a more collective sense of ego. This collective ego emphasizes the ‚we‘ rather than the ‚I.‘

One thing I want to make clear, as far as my own rebirth is concerned, the final authority is myself and no one else, and obviously not China’s Communists.

We’re always looking over our shoulders, ‚what they will think, what the press will think, what will this one – am I making the right career move?‘ When you’re young you have to do all that to survive, I suppose.

Republicans are for both the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict the man before the dollar.

I will never say something I don’t agree with or believe in… even if the reward is massive!

Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.

I never desired to please the rabble. What pleased them, I did not learn; and what I knew was far removed from their understanding.

You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection.

The Public is merely a multiplied ‚me.‘

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

If you make yourself indispensable to your employer, he is not going to part with you in a hurry no matter what it costs him.

A wise woman wishes to be no one’s enemy; a wise woman refuses to be anyone’s victim.

‚Harry Potter‘ gave me back self respect. Harry gave me a job to do that I loved more than anything else.

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.

There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families.

Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.

At Columbia Law School, my professor of constitutional law and federal courts, Gerald Gunther, was determined to place me in a federal court clerkship, despite what was then viewed as a grave impediment: On graduation, I was the mother of a 4-year-old child.

Throughout my years in business, I discovered something. I would always ask why you do things. The answers that I would invariably get are: ‚Oh, that’s just the way things are done around here.‘ Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks very deeply about things in business.

What someone else does or doesn’t do has no effect on me and what I do.

Remember: your bosses prefer to keep you in dependent positions. It is in their interest that you do not become self-reliant, and so they will tend to hoard information. You must secretly work against this and seize this information for yourself.

I think Americans generally are not used to working very hard, in terms of working for the collective. I think in our country we have taken individualism to its farthest reaches, possibly.