Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be. Jane Austen, Emma
Today the individual has become the highest form, and the greatest bane, of artistic creation. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other’s eyes and yet deny each other’s existence. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster’s whim and the purest ideal. Ingmar Bergman
Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood. Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self
In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately springs as a gigantic summation from these hidden source in individuals. Carl Gustav Jung
A group experience takes place on a lower level of consciousness than the experience of an individual. This is due to the fact that, when many people gather together to share one common emotion, the total psyche emerging from the group is below the level of the individual psyche. If it is a very large group, the collective psyche will be more like the psyche of an animal, which is the reason why the ethical attitude of large organizations is always doubtful. The psychology of a large crowd inevitably sinks to the level of mob psychology. If, therefore, I have a so-called collective experience as a member of a group, it takes place on a lower level of consciousness than if I had the experience by myself alone. Carl Gustav Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
The progress of the world can certainly never come at all save by the modified action of the individual beings who compose the world. George Eliot
That which is good for the society is not necessarily good for the individual. That which is good for the individual is good for the society. Richard Diaz
Man as an individual is a genius. But men in the mass form the headless monster, a great, brutish idiot that goes where prodded. Charlie Chaplin
Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfilment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way. Noam Chomsky
I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government other than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual. Samuel Johnson
For the ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics), he feels himself master of his fate, but against major events, he is as helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavouring to influence the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him. George Orwell
These are families of theory ... The Pearl View ... At the heart of every individual is something which is permanent, unchanging, some kind of essence of who they are ... The alternative theory ... is that this essence just isn’t there ... The Bundle Theory [David Hume] ... We are this collection of thoughts, experiences, memories and so forth. Julian Baggini, editor-in-chief The Philosophers’ Magazine, interview
I think everybody’s weird. We should all celebrate our individuality and not be embarrassed or ashamed of it. Johnny Depp
Our culture promotes individuality, while the Amish are deeply entrenched in community. To us, if someone stands out, it’s no big deal because diversity is respected and expected. To the Amish, there’s no room for deviation from the norm. It’s important to fit in, because that similarity of identity is what defines the society. If you don’t fit in, the consequences are psychological tragic, you stand alone when all you’ve ever known is being part of the group. Jodi Picoult, Plain Truth
It is a blessed thing that in every age some one has had the individuality enough and courage enough to stand by his own convictions. Robert Ingersoll
Punk has always been about doing things your own way. What it represents for me is ultimate freedom and a sense of individuality. Billy Joe Armstrong
The reason most people don’t express their individuality and actually deny it is not fear of what prime ministers think of us or the head of the federal reserve, it’s what their families and their friends down at the bar are going to think of them. David Icke
I believe in individuality, that everybody is special, and it’s up to them to find that quality and let it live. Grace Jones
I learned to embrace my individuality, and if that meant writing a song on one chord over and over again, then that’s what I do. Beth Orton
The fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a greater danger to the privacy of the individual. Earl Warren
The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible. William S Burroughs
No matter how you care to define it, I do not identify with the local group. Planet, species, race, nation, state, religion, party, union, club, association, neighbourhood improvement committee; I have no interest in any of it. I love and treasure individuals as I meet them. I loathe and despise the groups they identify with and belong to. George Carlin, Brain Droppings audio
Comrades! We must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all. Nikita Khrushchev
We are each a separate human being, Brandon. And with the right to live and work and think as individuals. But with an obligation to the society we live in. By what right do you dare say there is a superior few to which you belong? Rope 1948 starring James Stewart & John Dall & Farley Granger & John Chandler & Cedric Hardwicke & Constance Collier & Douglas Dick & Edith Evanson et al, director Alfred Hitchcock, Stewart
I am having trouble with the nature of individuality. Star Trek: Voyager s5e11: Latent Image, Seven of Nine to Janeway
Oh hell, say that I am sui generis and let it go at that. Huey Long
I cannot hide what I am. I must be sad when I have cause, and smile at no man’s jests; eat when I have stomach, and wait for no man’s leisure; sleep when I am drowsy, and tend to no man’s business; laugh when I am merry, and claw no man in his humour. William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing I iii 13-18, Don John to Conrad
It is only when there is strong social solidarity and a powerful collective conscience that individuals have a platform on which to express their individualism. Will Hutton, The World We’re In p73
There’s a rebel lying deep in my soul. Any time anybody tells me the trend is such and such, I go the opposite direction. I hate the idea of trends. I hate imitation. I have a reverence for individuality. Clint Eastwood, Wild Open Spaces: Why We Love Westerns
In reaction against the age-old slogan ‘woman is the weaker vessel’, or the still more offensive ‘woman is a divine creature’ we have, I think, allowed ourselves to drift into asserting that ‘a woman is as good as a man’, without always pausing to think what exactly we mean by that. What, I feel, we ought to mean is something so obvious that it is apt to escape attention altogether, viz ... that a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual. What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person. Dorothy L Sayers, Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society
It is vain to talk of the interest of the community, without understanding what is the interest of the individual. Jeremy Bentham
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. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation
A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following ‘by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated by freeing them from their ineffectual selves – and it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole’. Of all the cults and philosophies that competed in the Graeco-Roman world, Christianity alone developed from its inception a compact organization. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
The Amish see individuals as weak. Karen M Johnson-Weiner, anthropologist