Quotes about Individuality

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.

Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history. Even the child Ruth May touched history. Everyone is complicit. The okapi complied by living, and the spider by dying. It would have lived if it could. Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different, though. You could say the view is larger.

The wonder to me now is that I thought my life worth saving...Desperate to save myself in a river of people saving themselves. And if they chanced to look down and see me struggling underneath them, they saw that even the crooked girl believed her own life was precious.

Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.

It hit me pretty hard, how there's no kind of sad in this world that will stop it turning. People will keep on wanting what they want, and you're on your own.