Quotes about Individualism

I guard my treasures: my thought, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom.

For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors - between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.

But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else.

Be ugly, be God

For they have nothing to fight me with, save the brute force of their numbers. I have my mind.

I don't make comparisons. I never think of myself in relation to anyone else. I just refuse to measure myself as part of anything. I'm an utter egotist.

If you want my advice, Peter, you've made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don't you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?

A truly selfish man cannot be affected by the approval of others. He doesn't need it.

Man is an end in himself.

I want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of all - that I was a man who made money

You don't care what others think - which might be understandable. But you don't care even to make them think as you do? No. But that's...that's monstrous. Is it? Probably. I couldn't say.

This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.