To refrain from imitation is the best revenge.

If you keep proving stuff that others have done, getting confidence, increasing the complexities of your solutions – for the fun of it – then one day you’ll turn around and discover that nobody actually did that one!

I am the astronaut of boxing. Joe Louis and Dempsey were just jet pilots. I’m in a world of my own.

I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.

I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird.

I am just one human being.

A musician should only sound like what they do, and no two musicians sound the same. It’s an individual-feel thing, you know?

I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

Originality is really important.

All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.

In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

I don’t really have a gimmick or a ‚thing.‘ I’m one of the few artists who gets to be himself every day.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

I don’t compare myself to anyone else; I don’t make comments about anyone else because they do what feels right for them, and that’s okay by me.

There is a piece of me that likes to fondly imagine my maverick and rebellious nature. But, more accurately, I like to have a nice and cosy institution that I can rub up against a little bit.

I would never exchange my life with anybody else’s.

Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

The bottom line is that everyone thinks differently.

To such an extent does nature delight and abound in variety that among her trees there is not one plant to be found which is exactly like another; and not only among the plants, but among the boughs, the leaves and the fruits, you will not find one which is exactly similar to another.

After winning, most teams become individuals; most teams become complacent.

Certain defects are necessary for the existence of individuality.

The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.

Strength lies in differences, not in similarities.

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

God made me and broke the mold.

While children are struggling to be unique, the world around them is trying all means to make them look like everybody else.

Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.

Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.

The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it.

We are all special cases.

I think style is being so comfortable and confident in what you’re wearing. That’s what style is, ‚cause everybody’s got different style.

I periodically realize every few years that the only person whose taste I really trust is me.

We have to wake up. We have to refuse to be a clone.

Remember that the revolution is what is important, and each one of us, alone, is worth nothing.

It never mattered to me that people in school didn’t think that country music was cool, and they made fun of me for it – though it did matter to me that I was not wearing the clothes that everybody was wearing at that moment. But at some point, I was just like, ‚I like wearing sundresses and cowboy boots.‘

Our diversity is our strength. What a dull and pointless life it would be if everyone was the same.

The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I’m against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.

I don’t have a type. I don’t have a specific kind of human being. It’s just kind of an X-factor of sorts. Everybody I’ve ever dated has been a case-by-case situation.

I’m a really particular person. I want it my way.

Everyone should be respected as an individual, but no one idolized.

People ask me where I got my singing style. I didn’t copy my style from anybody.

The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.

I’m gonna make what I want to make, and other people are gonna like what they’re gonna like. It doesn’t really matter.

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.

I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don’t like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don’t like to be shaped by society.

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

There are definitely elements of experience and stuff that someone who’s my age wouldn’t have. But there are also things that I can do that other people wouldn’t necessarily be able to.

Most people are happy being average. Most are happy being faceless in a sea of faces.

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.

It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry ‚I could have thought of that‘ is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn’t, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.

I don’t think there’s anything unique about human intelligence.

I’m a free spirit.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

No one tells me what to do with my music. Real. My mom doesn’t tell what to say, how is someone else going to?

To become ‚unique,‘ the challenge is to fight the hardest battle which anyone can imagine until you reach your destination.

People should make up their own mind about what they think of me.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.