Quotes about Individualism

Even Martin Luther's needed "justification by faith" sent us on a five-hundred-year battle for the private soul of the individual.* Thus leaving us with almost no care for the earth, society, the outsider, or the full Body of Christ. This is surely one reason why Christianity found itself incapable of critiquing social calamities like Nazism, slavery, and Western consumerism.

One side effect of our individualized reading of the Gospel is that it allows the clergy great control over individual behavior, via threats and rewards. Obedience to authorities became the highest virtue in this framework, instead of love, communion, or solidarity with God or others, including the marginalized.

Privatized salvation never accumulates into corporate change because it attracts and legitimates individualists to begin with.

The national anthem of hell is, "I Did It My Way."

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

It is strange people should be so greedy when they are alone in the world!

It is so strange people should be so greedy, when they are alone in the world!

It ended. Well, we must be for ourselves in the long run; the mild and generous are only more justly selfish than the domineering - and it ended when circumstances caused each to feel that one's interest was not the chief consideration in the other's thoughts.

The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even — if you will — eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned impostor couldn't be happy with. Something, in other words, that can't be shared, like your own skin — not even by a minority.

Yes. What you have here is what might be translated into raw individualism, you see, if you didn't realize that the center was also right there facing you in the other person. This is the mythological way of being an individual. You are the central mountain, and the central mountain is everywhere.

We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires.

Only when the human spirit is allowed to invent and create, only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefiting from their success -- only then can societies remain economically alive, dynamic, prosperous, progressive and free.