Quotes about Individuality

You have to be yourself. Everyone else is taken.

Were I a nightingale, I would sing like a nightingale; were I a swan, like a swan. But as it is, I am a rational being, therefore I must sing hymns of praise to God.

I never desired to please the rabble. What pleased them, I did not learn; and what I knew was far removed from their understanding.

When I consider the seven women I chose, I see that most of them were great for reasons that derive precisely from their being women, not in spite of it; and what made them great has nothing to do with their being measured against or competing with men. In other words, their accomplishments are not gender-neutral but are rooted in their singularity as women.

She firmly believes feminism to be anti-woman because it pressures women to become more like men.

Men and women are not interchangeable. There are things men can and should do that women cannot, and there are things that women can and should do that men cannot. So comparing men and women is something like comparing apples and oranges, except apples and oranges are actually far more like each other than are men and women. Apples and oranges can exist without each other, but men and women cannot.

The lesson in all this is that to pit women against men is a form of denigration of women, as though their measure must be determined by masculine standards.

At some point every person must hear from God, must know what God was calling him to do, apart from others.

That country where they wouldn't be told what to think or how to live or even whether or how to worship.

This brings home the saying and mantra for the future—"Nothing about me without me"—which should and will undeniably apply to individuals when they assume the role of IAPs.38

To be human is to be beautifully flawed

The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I'm thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad.