Selected individuality quotes

1. Every man and every woman is a star.

2. Without me there could be no everybody.

3. I march to a different drummer, whose location, identity, and musical training haven't yet been established.

4. Psychoanalysis. Almost went three times - almost. Then I decided what was peculiar about me was probably what made me successful. I've seen some very talented actors go into analysis and really lose it.

5. Man, the living creature, the creating individual, is always more important than any established style or system.

6. I love strange choices. I'm always interested in people who depart from what is expected of them and go into new territory.

7. When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free.

8. I'm not your executioner. I'm not your devil and I'm not your God. I'm Charles Manson.

9. In the great flood of human life that is spawned upon the earth, it is not often that a man is born.

10. In their religion they are so uneven, That each man goes his own byway to heaven.

11. We all know we are unique individuals, but we tend to see others as representatives of groups.

12. My life is about my journey, and your life is about your journey. You are completely unqualified to draw my map, and I am completely unqualified to draw yours. I hope you'll let me know all about the path you've found, so that I may judge it for myself against my own path, and have the freedom to choose between the two. But please don't try and drag me from my path on to yours, and I will be sure to return the favor.

13. Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.

14. Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.

15. In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.

16. Men are born equal but they are also born different.

17. There's a right way of doing things and a wrong way. If you've made up your mind to be different from everybody else, I don't suppose I can stop you, but I really don't think it's very considerate.

18. A person in a rented apartment must be able to lean out of his window and scrape off the masonry within arm's reach. And he must be allowed to take a long brush and paint everything outside within arm's reach. So that it will be visible from afar to everyone in the street that someone lives there who is different from the imprisoned, enslaved, standardised man who lives next door.

19. The living have never shown me how to live.

20. When I compare myself, my being-myself, with anything else whatever, all things alike, all in the same degree, rebuff me with blank unlikeness.

21. Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood.

22. The greatness of art is not to find what is common but what is unique.

23. Instead of boiling up individuals into the species, I would draw a chalk circle round every individuality, and preach to it to keep within that, and preserve and cultivate its identity.

24. This is the strangest life I've ever known.

25. I pride myself on being incorrigible. I have a very hard time being told what to do.

26. Stupidity is much the same all the world over. A stupid person's notions and feelings may confidently be inferred from those which prevail in the circle by which the person is surrounded. Not so with those whose opinions and feelings are an emanation from their own nature and faculties.

27. Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.

28. Stay crunchy, even in milk.

29. Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers.

30. People are not here to meet your expectations.

31. I agree that you might clone some people who would look amazingly like their parental cell donors, but the odds are that they'd be almost as different as you or me, and certainly more different than any of today's identical twins.

32. We have all in some degree become anarchistic.

33. Chief among our gains must be reckoned this possibility of choice, the recognition of many possible ways of life, where other civilizations have recognized only one. Where other civilizations give a satisfactory outlet to only one temperamental type, be he mystic or soldier, business man or artist, a civilization in which there are many standards offers a possibility of satisfactory adjustment to individuals of many different temperamental types, of diverse gifts and varying interests.

34. Knowledge of birth control is essentially moral. Its general, though prudent, practice must lead to a higher individuality and ultimately to a cleaner race.

35. Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The they, which supplies the answer to the who of everyday Da-sein, is the nobody to whom every Da-sein has always already surrendered itself, in its being-among-one-another.

36. Why do I have this imagination? It's the only one I've got!

37. The human features and countenance, although composed of but some ten parts or little more, are so fashioned that among so many thousands of men there are no two in existence who cannot be distinguished from one another.

38. You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it.

39. The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.

40. I like to skate on the other side of the ice.

41. The whole, though larger than any of its parts, does not necessarily obscure their separate identities.

42. Dear Child of Nature, let them rail!

43. One always goes against the current to reach the wellsprings, it is the trash which flows with the current.

44. He was cool before it was cool to be cool.

45. '[T]he only revolution worthwhile was the one-man revolution within the heart. Each one could make this by himself and not need to wait on a majority.'

46. There has never been superadded to these vices of mine the withering, embalming vice of consistency.

47. 'Gloria (In Excelsis Deo)': Jesus died For somebody's sins But not mine

48. Though he was a strong believer in individual difference and came to fear, above all, the thought that people would become interchangeable parts in a totalitarian system, he seems to have felt that as a subject for study himself he was a universal, i.e., a fair sample of his kind, capable of normative reactions under dissection. His end has something macabre in it, like the end of some Victorian pathologist who tested his theories on his own organs, neglecting asepsis. In his last letters, he speaks of his appearance as being 'frightening,' of being a 'death's head,' but all along he has been something of a specter at the feast. He was prone to see the handwriting on the wall, for England, for socialism, for personal liberty; indeed, his work is one insistent reminder, and his personal life - what we glimpse of it - even when he was fairly affluent seems to have been an illustrated lesson in survival techniques under extreme conditions, as though he expected to be cast adrift in a capsule.

49. people see me I'm a challenge to your balance I'm over your heads how I confound you and astound you

50. And now Marat now I see where this revolution is heading To the withering of the individual man and a slow merging into uniformity to the death of choice to self denial to deadly weakness in a state which has no contract with individuals but which is impregnable

51. The true woman will not be exponent of another, or allow another to be such for her. She will be her own individual self... Stand or fall by her own individual wisdom and strength... She will proclaim the 'glad tidings of good news' to all women, that woman equally with man was made for her own individual happiness, to develop... every talent given to her by God, in the great work of life.

52. I don't know why I'm even on this track/Y'all niggas ain't even on my level

53. There's been 11 billion people to walk the face of this earth, but there's never been one like you! - Zig Ziglar

54. Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.

55. Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them; disagree with them; glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

56. Ain't no man can avoid being born average, but there ain't no man got to be common.

57. Fear not the path of truth, for the lack of people walking on it.

58. Mass democracy, mass morality and the mass media thrive independently of the individual, who joins them only at the cost of at least a partial perversion of his instincts and insights. He pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul - his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.

59. Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity. Each actual occasion contributes to the circumstances of its origin additional formative elements deepening its own peculiar individuality. Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies. An actual individual, of such higher grade, has truck with the totality of things by reason of its sheer actuality; but it has attained its individual depth of being by a selective emphasis limited to its own purposes. The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection.

60. What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it; what another would have written as well, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself-and thus make yourself indispensable.

61. Man is more interesting than men. God made him and not them in his image. Each one is more precious than all.

62. 'When a person identifies himself with a group his critical faculties are diminished and his passions enhanced by a kind of emotive resonance. The individual is not a killer, the group is, and by identifying with it, the individual becomes one. This is the infernal dialect reflected in man's history.'

63. I am convinced that human continuance depends entirely upon: the intuitive wisdom of each and every individual . . . the individual's integrity of speaking and acting only on the individual's own within-self-intuited and reasoned initiative . . . the individual's never joining action with others as motivated only by crowd-engendered-emotionalism, or a sense of the crowd's power to overwhelm, or in fear of holding to the course indicated by one's own intellectual convictions.

64. I never try to tell anybody else what to do, number one. And number two, I think that's what the individual is all about. Each one of us has something to contribute. This really depends on each one doing their own thinking, but not following any kind of rule that I can give out, any command. We're all on the frontier, we're all in a great mystery - incredibly mysterious. Each one possesses exactly what each one is working out, and what each one works out relates to their particular set of circumstances of any one day, or any one place around the world.

65. When I was born, humanity was 95 per cent illiterate. Since I've been born, the population has doubled and that total population is now 65 per cent literate. That's a gain of 130-fold of the literacy. When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans them-selves are literate, able to get the information, we're in an entirely new relationship to Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do.

66. 'I hear my father-in-law's response: 'Naive, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!' Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?' (p.529-- final passage)

67. You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you worry you are an interchangeable cog.

68. What is the one thing more than any other thing that makes one person different from any other person?

69. There is room in the halls of pleasure For a long and lordly train, But one by one we must all file on Through the narrow aisles of pain.

70. Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases - which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept 'leaf' is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects.

71. Minds do not act together in public; they simply stick together; and when their private activities are resumed, they fly apart again.

72. For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington.

73. You wanted to look at life for yourself - but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional!

74. The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy. Consistency was in itself distinction, and what was talent but the art of being completely whatever it was that one happened to be?

75. I can't help feeling wary when I hear anything said about the masses. First you take their faces from 'em by calling 'em the masses and then you accuse 'em of not having any faces.

76. It is all very well to be able to write books, but can you waggle your ears?

77. Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?

78. Poetry is an ethic. By ethic I mean a secret code of behavior, a discipline constructed and conducted according to the capabilities of a man who rejects the falsifications of the categorical imperative. This personal morality may appear to be immorality itself in the eyes of those who lie to themselves, or who live a life of confusion, in such a manner that, for them, a lie becomes the truth, and our truth becomes a lie...

79. Originality consists in trying to be like everybody else - and failing.

80. Individuality of expression is the beginning and end of all art.

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

82. Be a first rate version of yourself, not a second rate version of someone else.

83. 'Were we all like the Sawhorse, we would all be Sawhorses, which would be too many of the kind. Were we all like Hank, we would be a herd of mules; if like Toto, we would be a pack of dogs; should we all become the shape of the Woozy, he would no longer be remarkable for his unusual appearance. Finally, were you all like me, I would consider you so common that I would not care to associate with you. To be individual, my friends, to be different from others, is the only way to become distinguished from the common herd. Let us be glad, therefore, that we differ from one another in form and in disposition. Variety is the spice of life, and we are various enough to enjoy one another's society; so let us be content.'

84. There were never in the world two opinions alike, any more than two hairs or two grains. Their most universal quality is diversity.

85. Chaque homme porte la forme, entiere de l'humaine condition.

86. Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.

87. Existe gente que esta tan llena de sentido comun que no le queda el mas pequeno rincon para el sentido propio.

88. I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood.

89. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

90. The ordinary society is like a paperweight on you: it won't allow you to fly.

91. Picasso es pintor, yo tambien; Picasso es espanol, yo tambien; Picasso es comunista, yo tampoco.

92. Another friend began to say, 'Well, Quentin has a problem of adjusting himself to society and he...' This sentence was never finished. The ballet teacher expostulated, 'I don't agree. Quentin does exactly as he pleases. The rest of us have to adapt ourselves to him.'

93. The society in which each man lives is at once the basis for, and the nemesis of, that fulness of life which each man seeks.

94. The brotherhood of the community is indeed the ground in which the individual is ethically realized. But the community is the frustration as well as the realization of individual life. Its collective egotism is an offense to his conscience; its institutional injustices negate the ideal of justice; and such brotherhood as it achieves is limited by ethnic and geographic boundaries. Historical communities are, in short, more deeply involved in nature and time than the individual.

95. My wife Ticky is an anarchist-individualist... When she was in the Navy during the early 'forties she showed up one morning in proper uniform but with her red hair held down by a simple navy-blue band - a hair ribbon. It was neat (Ticky is always neat) and it suited the rest of her outfit esthetically, but it was undeniably a hair ribbon and her division officer had fits. 'If you can show me,' Ticky answered with simple diginity, 'where it says one word in the Navy Uniform Regulations on the subject of hair ribbons, I'll take it off. Otherwise not.' See what I mean? She doesn't have the right attitude.

96. Be there, for once and all, Severed great minds from small, Announced to each his station in the Past! Was I, the world arraigned, Were they, my soul disdained, Right? Let age speak the truth and give us peace at last! Now, who shall arbitrate? Ten men love what I hate, Shun what I follow, slight what I receive; Ten, who in ears and eyes Match me: we all surmise, They this thing, I that: whom shall my soul believe?

97. In the old times of which I have spoken, they desired to make all men think exactly alike. All the mechanical ingenuity of the world cannot make two clocks run exactly alike, and how are you going to make hundreds of millions of people, differing in brain and disposition, in education and aspiration, in conditions and surroundings, each clad in a living robe of passionate flesh - how are you going to make them think and feel alike? If there is an infinite god, one who made us, and wishes us to think alike, why did he give a spoonful of brains to one, and a magnificent intellectual development to another? Why is it that we have all degrees of intelligence, from orthodoxy to genius, if it was intended that all should think and feel alike?

98. I want no heaven for which I must give my reason; no happiness in exchange for my liberty, and no immortality that demands the surrender of my individuality.

99. The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and his fellow men.

100. [Ron Paul is the] one exception to the Gang of 535.