“It is not a matter of competing with someone else. Essentially, it is accepting our own special abilities as special – and then developing them.”

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 56.

Source: Fight Club

Part I, Ch.9 - p.83
The Shepherd's Hut (2018)

Source: The Secret Life of Bees

Source: Dragonsinger

Nobel lecture (1970)
Context: In recent times it has been fashionable to talk of the levelling of nations, of the disappearance of different races in the melting-pot of contemporary civilization. I do not agree with this opinion, but its discussion remains another question. Here it is merely fitting to say that the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.

1988

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms