Quotes about Individuality

I know what I want up to the age of two hundred. Know what you want in life and go after it. I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals, and I loathe humanity, for its failure to live up to these possibilities.

They kept their secret from the knowledge of others, not as a shameful guilt, but as a thing that was immaculately theirs, beyond anyone's right of debate or appraisal.

To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes.

Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence—by his own choice.

It does not matter that only a few in each generation will grasp and achieve the full reality of man's proper stature—and that the rest will betray it. It is those few that move the world and give life its meaning—and it is those few that I have always sought to address.

What is my life, if I am but to bow, to agree, and to obey?

Why, child, such things are to be decided only by you and my son.

There are only individual minds and individual achievements—and a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiated masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority.

Did it ever occur to you that I have a life to live - in my spare time? The Soviet State recognizes no life but that of a social class.

Each of us deserves the freedom to pursue our own version of happiness. No one deserves to be bullied.

I resolved the lingering questions of my racial identity. For it turned out there was no single way to be Black; just trying to be a good man was enough.