"Individualist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... contrary, he was a somewhat too grasping Individualist. Howbeit, I enabled him to make good his defalcation—in the city they consider a defalcation made good when the money is replaced—and to go to New York. I recommended him not to go there; but he ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... were the influences and the circumstances which revolutionised Giannoli's entire life and his outlook on things. He became one of the leaders of the most advanced section of the "Individualist Anarchists," who maintain that not only is government of man by man wrong and objectionable, but that no ties or obligations of any sort bind men together. The ethics of "humanity" and "brotherhood" are unknown to these Anarchists. They recognise no laws, social or moral, no obligations ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... you are," he continued eagerly. "No true Russia! Quite so. Very observant. But we have to pretend there is, and that's what you foreigners are always forgetting. The Russian is an individualist—give him freedom and he'll lose all sense of his companions. He will pursue his own idea. Myself and my party are here to prevent him from pursuing his own idea, for the good of himself and his country. He may be discontented, he may grumble, but he doesn't realise ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... heroes. When I first knew him all was Aristotle. Later all was Rosmini. Later still Rosmini seemed forgotten. He knew so many writers that he grew fond of very various ones and had a strange tolerance for systematizers and dogmatizers whom, as the consistent individualist that he was, he should have disliked. Hegel, it is true, he detested; but he always spoke with reverence of Kant. Of Mill and Spencer he had a low opinion; and when I lent him Paulsen's Introduction to Philosophy ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... present state of industry, when everything is interdependent, when each branch of production is knit up with all the rest, the attempt to claim an Individualist origin for the products of industry is absolutely untenable. The astonishing perfection attained by the textile or mining industries in civilized countries is due to the simultaneous development of a thousand other industries, great and ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... equality, though most of them fight the battle against equality with the very word itself the slogan on their lips. In the name of equality they destroy equality. That was why I called them stupid. As for myself, I am an individualist. I believe the race is to the swift, the battle to the strong. Such is the lesson I have learned from biology, or at least think I have learned. As I said, I am an individualist, and individualism is the hereditary ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... quoted, that perhaps give a literal warrant for the charge. Nominally he bases morality on happiness, but his real base is the happiness of the greatest number. To borrow Mr. Sidgwick's classification, Holbach is a universalistic and not an egoistic Hedonist. The spirit of what he says is, in fact, not individualist but social. "The good man is he to whom true ideas have shown his own interest or his own happiness to lie in such a way of acting, that others are forced to love and approve for their own interest.... It ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... spite of all his stodgy German faults, Goethe is the best guide through the mysteries of life whom the modern world has yet produced. Oscar Wilde stopped where the religion of Goethe began; he was far more of a pagan and individualist than the great German; he lived for the beautiful and extraordinary, but not for the Good and still less for the Whole; he acknowledged no moral obligation; in commune bonis was an ideal which never said anything to him; he cared nothing ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... an assumption, probing an hypothesis. But in general his feeling gave way more and more. That moral sensitiveness in him which in its special nature was a special inheritance, the outcome of a long individualist development under the conditions of English Protestantism, made him from the first the natural prey of Ancrum's spiritual passion. As soon as a true contact between them was set up, David began to feel the religious temper and life in Ancrum ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the more personal, more concrete aspects of "God" goes entirely well with the rest of his philosophy. At heart he was a savage Dualist, who lapsed occasionally into Pluralism. He was, above all, an Individualist of the most extreme kind—an Individualist so hard, so positive, so inflexible, that for him nothing in the world really mattered except the clash of definite, clear-cut Wills, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... argue rationally for or against any existent and recognisable thing, such as the Eugenic class of legislation, there are always people who begin to chop hay about Socialism and Individualism; and say "You object to all State interference; I am in favour of State interference. You are an Individualist; I, on the other hand," etc. To which I can only answer, with heart-broken patience, that I am not an Individualist, but a poor fallen but baptised journalist who is trying to write a book about Eugenists, several of whom he has met; whereas he never met an Individualist, ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... and all the evil fruits of poverty, as inextricably as with enterprise, wealth, commercial probity, and national prosperity. The notion that you can earmark certain coins as tainted is an unpractical individualist superstition. None the less the fact that all our money is tainted gives a very severe shock to earnest young souls when some dramatic instance of the taint first makes them conscious of it. When an enthusiastic young clergyman of the Established Church first ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... Faith in the form of the Individualist's LAISSEZ FAIRE never won upon me. I disliked Herbert Spencer all my life until I read his autobiography, and then I laughed a little and loved him. I remember as early as the City Merchants' days how Britten and I scoffed at that pompous question-begging word "Evolution," having, so to ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... of looking at things and its peculiar basis of opinion on which its collective action and its social regulations rest. All this is largely unconscious. The average citizen of three generations ago was probably not aware that he was an extreme individualist. The average citizen of to-day is not conscious of the fact that he has ceased to be one. The man of three generations ago had certain ideas which he held to be axiomatic, such as that his house was his castle, and that property was property and that what was his was his. But ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... trouble to correct the popular idea of Lord Kitchener's character beyond saying that he was the last man in the world to be called a machine, and that he solemnly distrusted the mechanism of all organizations. He was first and last an out-and-out individualist, a believer in men, a hater of all systems. As Sir Ian Hamilton has said, wherever he saw organization his first instinct was to smash it. I think his autocracy at the War Office might have been of greater service ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... are all becoming Socialists without knowing it; by which I would not in the least refer to the acute case of Mr. Hyndman and his horn-blowing supporters, sounding their trumps of a Sunday within the walls of our individualist Jericho—but to the stealthy change that has come over the spirit of Englishmen and English legislation. A little while ago, and we were still for liberty; 'crowd a few more thousands on the bench of Government,' we seemed to ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... be revoked. First a good many laws would have to be revised, and that's politically impossible. There is still a lot of individualist sentiment in North America, as witness the fact that businesses do get launched and that the Essjays did have a hard campaign to get elected. What the new government wants is something like the Eighteenth Century English policy ...
— Industrial Revolution • Poul William Anderson
... "The present individualist system which takes care of the business interests of the farmer is a dividing and disintegrating force. It tends to destroy the natural associative character and to set each man against his neighbor.... But as a member of a society with interests in common with others, the individual consciously ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... was foolish to give way to the feeling of every man for himself but I am not a spaceman trained to react automatically to emergencies. Neither am I a navigator or a pilot, although I can fly in an emergency. I am a biologist, a specialist member of the scientific staff—essentially an individualist. I knew enough to seal myself in, push the eject button and energize the drive. However, I did not know that a lifeboat had no acceleration compensators, and by the time the drive lever returned to neutral, I was ...
— The Issahar Artifacts • Jesse Franklin Bone
... protect itself and its innocent members against the drunkard, it is more doubtful whether it owes to the man, for his sake, protection against his own blunders. Not even the gods can save the stupid. Temperance legislation is strongest in its social aspect. The opponent of it usually champions the individualist view; its partizans uphold, in varying degrees, ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... individualist and anarchist doctrine was not suited to form the basis of a general Chinese social order, and its employment in support of dictatorship was certainly not in the spirit of Lao Tzu. Throughout history, however, Taoism remained the philosophic attitude of individuals of the ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... of the Socialist and the Radical Individualist, pleading for union among those who formed the wings of the army of Labour, and urging union of all workers against the idlers. For the weakness of the people has ever been in their divisions, in the readiness of each section to turn its weapons against other sections ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... simple. He imagined that no man can satisfactorily accomplish his life's work without loyal and whole-hearted cooperation of the woman he lives with. And he was beginning to perceive dimly that, whereas his own traditions were entirely collective, his wife was a sheer individualist. His own theory—the feudal theory of an over-lord doing his best by his dependents, the dependents meanwhile doing their best for the over-lord—this theory was entirely foreign to Leonora's nature. She came of a family of small Irish landlords—that hostile garrison ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... has a duty in adjusting pioneer ideals to the new requirements of American democracy, even more important than those which I have named. The early pioneer was an individualist and a seeker after the undiscovered; but he did not understand the richness and complexity of life as a whole; he did not fully realize his opportunities of individualism and discovery. He stood in his ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... say, is one aspect of the matter. But then there is the other side—the question of social reform in this country. Now here again we differ from the Cobdenite. The Cobdenite is an individualist. He believes that private enterprise, working under a system of unfettered competition, with cheapness as its supreme object, is the surest road to universal well-being. The Tariff Reformer also believes in private enterprise, but he does not believe that ...
— Constructive Imperialism • Viscount Milner
... Sewall, being a strong individualist, was more than dubious concerning the practicality of the cooeperative round-up. The cowmen were passionately devoted to the idea of the open range; to believe in fences was treason; but it was in fences ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... have been a bishop. Nice jobs, lots of money. Buys a job for his son so he can get married and have a wife and a home and a baby and not be a Red. You think I'm a Red? Hell, no. I'm a hundred per cent American. I'm an individualist. Americans are individualists. Each man got his own wife 'n' his own bed. A Russian's a collectivist. ...
— Class of '29 • Orrie Lashin and Milo Hastings
... himself even with dirty water." This, I venture to suggest, requires some explanation. At a time when individuality is supposed to be shown most tellingly by putting boots on one's hands and gloves on one's feet, it is somewhat refreshing to come across a true individualist who feels the chasm between himself and others so deeply, that he must perforce adapt himself to them outwardly, at least, in all respects, so that the inner difference should be overlooked. Nietzsche practically ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... and that the best possible distribution of social duties between the individual and the state would cut both at some point or other. For many Socialists and Individualists the mere attempt to think in such a way of their problem would be an extremely valuable exercise. If a Socialist and an Individualist were required even to ask themselves the question, 'How much Socialism'? or 'How much Individualism'? a basis of real discussion would be arrived at—even in the impossible case that one should answer, ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... The individualist tells me that the free play of the Natural Laws governing the struggle for existence will result in the Survival of the Fittest, and that in the course of a few ages, more or less, a much nobler type will be evolved. But ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... many early English meeting houses, the men and women sat apart, the men on one side of the middle aisle, and the women on the other, so that men and women were not equals in the individualist sense, as they are for instance, in the practice and theory of Socialism, but were equals in separate group-life; to each sex, grouped apart from the other, equal functions were supposed to be delegated. Oblong Meeting House, on Quaker Hill, had seats for two hundred ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... moment you talk of compensation you surrender the Socialist principle of justice, for compensation can only be real if it is adequate, and can only be adequate if it counterbalances, and thereby annuls, the confiscation. It is just, says the individualist, for a man to be able to do what he likes with his own. Good; but what is his own?"[309] "The great act of confiscation will be the seal of the new era; then and not till then will the knell of civilisation, with its rights of property and its class society, be sounded; ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... country had come to a dark place of divided ways and divided counsels. In Hard Times he realised Democracy at war with Radicalism; and became, with so incompatible an ally as Ruskin, not indeed a Socialist, but certainly an anti-Individualist. In Our Mutual Friend he felt the strength of the new rich, and knew they had begun to transform the aristocracy, instead of the aristocracy transforming them. He knew that Veneering had carried off Twemlow in triumph. He very nearly knew what we all know to-day: that, ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton |
