individual quotes

Morality arose largely as an empirical defence of the individual and society. Ever since intelligent beings began to be in contact, and consequently in friction, they have felt the need to guard themselves against each other’s encroachments.

If you want to get each individual’s honest opinion, you don’t want that opinion to be influenced by others who are present, much less allow a group to coordinate what they are going to say.

Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.

Our single most important challenge is therefore to help establish a social order in which the freedom of the individual will truly mean the freedom of the individual.

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.

Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.

There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.

A public man must never forget that he loses his usefulness when he as an individual, rather than his policy, becomes the issue.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

You’re not just voting for an individual, in my judgment, you’re voting for an agenda. You’re voting for a platform. You’re voting for a political philosophy.

Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.

Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike.

The ultimate authority must always rest with the individual’s own reason and critical analysis.

People love westerns worldwide. There’s something fantasy-like about an individual fighting the elements. Or even bad guys and the elements. It’s a simpler time. There’s no organized laws and stuff.

The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.

Only our individual faith in freedom can keep us free.

A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others.

When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you’d been the only man in the world.

Contention does not usually begin as strife between countries. More often, it starts with an individual, for we can contend within ourselves over simple matters of right and wrong. From there, contention can infect neighbors and nations like a spreading sore.

What is true of the individual will be tomorrow true of the whole nation if individuals will but refuse to lose heart and hope.

Man as an individual is a genius. But men in the mass form the headless monster, a great, brutish idiot that goes where prodded.

When you look at a corporation, just like when you look at a slave owner, you want to distinguish between the institution and the individual. So slavery, for example, or other forms of tyranny, are inherently monstrous. The individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you can imagine.

Men hate the individual whom they call avaricious only because nothing can be gained from him.

An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

We shall probably get nearest to the truth if we think of the conscious and personal psyche as resting upon the broad basis of an inherited and universal psychic disposition which is as such unconscious, and that our personal psyche bears the same relation to the collective psyche as the individual to society.

We continue to recognize the greater ability of some to earn more than others. But we do assert that the ambition of the individual to obtain for him a proper security is an ambition to be preferred to the appetite for great wealth and great power.

The high destiny of the individual is to serve rather than to rule.

It is only to the individual that a soul is given.

And while the law of competition may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department.