Individuals Quotes

I love mankind, he said, but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.

~ John Rawls

Take lightly what you hear about individuals. We need not distort trust for our paltry little political agendas. We tend to trust soulless, carried information more than we trust soulful human beings; but really most people aren't so bad once you sit down and have an honest, one-on-one conversation with them, once, with an open heart, you listen to their explanations as to why they act the way they act, or say what they say, or do what they do.

~ Criss Jami

Keep away from the kinship of the individuals who continually ask and examine the imperfections of others.

~ Genereux Philip

I value individuals and societies. I care about those who are not born yet. That is the reason for my joys and blues.

~ Petek Kabakci

... unfools of unbeing ... means quite clearly people who are too stereotyped to be eccentric – people who are too dead spiritually to exist at all and who call alive individual fools

~ Norman Friedman

The basic element that will distinguish those that are for godliness from those that are promoting ungodliness is if such individuals possess the spirit of godliness and not just a form of it.

~ Sunday Adelaja

The individuals that will stand or speak or act for the sake of the society must be the kind of people that do not accept limitation.

~ Sunday Adelaja

People who have so much of their personality invested in the Internet can’t really survive as whole individuals without it.

~ Mark A. Rayner

Most of the time, we see only what we want to see, or what others tell us to see, instead of really investigate to see what is really there. We embrace illusions only because we are presented with the illusion that they are embraced by the majority. When in truth, they only become popular because they are pounded at us by the media with such an intensity and high level of repetition that its mere force disguises lies and truths. And like obedient schoolchildren, we do not question their validity and swallow everything up like medicine. Why? Because since the earliest days of our youth, we have been conditioned to accept that the direction of the herd, and authority anywhere — is always right.

~ Suzy Kassem

First, individual rights cannot be sacrificed for the sake of the general good, and second, the principles of justice that specify these rights cannot be premised on any particular vision of the good life. What justifies the rights is not that they maximize the general welfare or otherwise promote the good, but rather that they comprise a fair framework within which individuals and groups can choose their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others.

~ Michael J. Sandel

[T]he state should not impose a preferred way of life, but should leave its citizens as free as possible to choose their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others.

~ Michael J. Sandel

Cruel people are not only people who kill innocent people with guns. Individuals who steal from government coffers to enrich themselves at the expense of the poor are grossly cruel.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

All individuals have moral deficiencies, and when introducing these to reality one not only strengthens himself but also the confidence of others in the human exigency for Christ due to a reflection throughout the body of Christ.

~ Criss Jami

Love is dangerous because it makes you an individual. And the state and the church . . . they don’t want individuals, not at all. They don’t want human beings, they want sheep. They want people who only look like human beings but whose souls have been crushed so utterly, damaged so deeply, that it seems almost irreparable.

~ Osho

Culture, then, only truly becomes culture when it is embodied in someone.

~ László Krasznahorkai

There is history the way Tolstoy imagined it, as a great, slow-moving weather system in which even tsars and generals are just leaves before the storm. And there is history the way Hollywood imagines it, as a single story line in which the right move by the tsar or the wrong move by the general changes everything. Most of us, deep down, are probably Hollywood people. We like to invent “what if” scenarios--what if x had never happened, what if y had happened instead?--because we like to believe that individual decisions make a difference: that, if not for x, or if only there had been y, history might have plunged forever down a completely different path. Since we are agents, we have an interest in the efficacy of agency.

~ Louis Menand

Peace between countries must rest on the solid foundation of love between individuals.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

Your special spiritual gifts and talents are your calling.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

No two persons can learn something and experience it in the same way.

~ Shannon L. Alder

So your theory would seem to be that lying to yourself is no lie at all because you haven’t deceived any third party. And if you then convince yourself of those lies, you’ll believe them enough to repeat them to other with the genuine conviction that they’re true.” Something like that,” I conceded uneasily.

~ Zack Love

You have great talents. Aim for God best for your life.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg. Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals . . . We are all human beings, individuals, fragile eggs. We have no hope against the wall: it's too high, too dark, too cold. To fight the wall, we must join our souls together for warmth, strength. We must not let the system control us -- create who we are. It is we who created the system. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)

~ Haruki Murakami

...there is nothing so dangerous in its consequences as injustice to individuals- whether it arise from prejudice of color or from any other source, that a wrong done to one man is a wrong to society and to the world.

~ John Rollin Ridge

Of all individuals, the hated, the shunned, and the peculiar are arguably most themselves. They wear no masks whatsoever in order to be accepted and liked; they do seem most guarded, but only by their own hands: as compared to the populace, they are naked.

~ Criss Jami

When you have lived your individual life in your own adventurous way and then look back upon its course, you will find that you have lived a model human life, after all.

~ Joseph Campbell

It turns out that indecision is a path itself; but figuratively, a vertical path - up or down - meaning it isn't always a fruitless path. One is forgotten, but the other is glorified. To be what they call 'middle-of-the-road' in most cases just means you have a hard time figuring out who between options is dumber. So quite often those who refused to decide were, after all, the bold individuals, the influential ones, the creative ones, those who snatched their own authority.

~ Criss Jami

When you can find your own axis, you can revolve around it, for when you revolve your life on someone outside of you, you lose your own alignment. Just as the earth revolves around its own axis daily and through this eternal gentle revolving it also revolves around the sun, if you don’t find your own axis and you don’t gently revolve, you cannot be for anyone.Then, once you have centered on your axis and someone else who has also centered on theirs is brought into your world, the two of you can come together and there is a collision of axes and you shift from your center. This is the sensation of ‘falling in love’.

~ Malti Bhojwani

Let's face it. We live in a command-based system, where we have been programmed since our earliest school years to become followers, not individuals. We have been conditioned to embrace teams, the herd, the masses, popular opinion -- and to reject what is different, eccentric or stands alone. We are so programmed that all it takes for any business or authority to condition our minds to follow or buy something is to simply repeat a statement more than three or four times until we repeat it ourselves and follow it as truth or the best trendiest thing. This is called programming -- the frequent repetition of words to condition us how to think, what to like or dislike, and who to follow.

~ Suzy Kassem

[E]ach of our voices has something unique to say. Not only should I not mold my life to the demands of external conformity, I can't even find the model by which to live outside myself. I can only find it within.

~ Charles Taylor

We are alive in all our layers of self and selflessness - individuals becoming one.

~ Jay Woodman

God's plan is to make much of the man, far more of him than of anything else. Men are God's method. The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men.

~ E.m. Bounds

Unless individuals have the power to defy commoditization and define their own lives, their potential is vulnerable to the crushing forces of objectification.

~ Tom Hayes

Generalization is a natural human mental process, and many generalizations are true—in average. What often does promote evil behavior is the lazy, nasty habit of believing that generalizations have anything at all to do with individuals.

~ David Brin

Police officers are well known for their aggressive behaviors, search Police Officer Angry Aggression Theory. I can speak from personal experience that they do cover up for each other and target individuals that they have a vendetta on. Police Internal Affairs is just an extension of the cover up machine, they uphold very few complaints.

~ Steven Magee

The world population is nearing seven billion. John Travolta and Farrah Fawcett didn’t procreate and produce all seven thousand million of us. Audrey Hepburn and Burt Lancaster didn’t personally populate the world. Almost every child that was ever born is the byproduct of two everyday people who found each other attractive enough to go jump in the sack together. Almost every child that was ever born came about because two everyday people thought the other was attractive enough to warrant a second glance. If you want proof that attraction belongs to the individual, go sit on a bench at the mall and look at all the different couples walking by.You will believe that there literally is someone for everyone.

~ Dan Pearce

They might think you are being delusional for dreaming big, but so did a lot people think about most great individuals before their greatness.

~ Hafiz

One of the differences between some successful and unsuccessful people is that one group is full of doers, while the other is full of wishers.

~ Hafiz

Everybody thinks that they are on top of their goals and dreams until they find themselves in the midst of highly motivated ambitious positive minded individuals.

~ Hafiz

[E]ach person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.

~ John Rawls