Quotes about individual
page 10

Muhammad bin Tughluq photo

“Muhammad ibn Tughlaq “led forth his army to ravage Hindostan. He laid the country waste from Kanauj to Dalmau [on the Ganges, in the Rai Baréli District, Oudh], and every person that fell into his hands he slew. Many of the inhabitants fled and took refuge in the jungles, but the Sultan had the jungles surrounded, and every individual that was captured was killed.””

Muhammad bin Tughluq (1290–1351) Turkic Sultan of Delhi

Vincent Arthur Smith, The Oxford History of India: From the Earliest Times to the End of 1911 (Clarendon Press, 1920), 241-2. as quoted in Spencer, Robert (2018). The history of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS.

Francis Escudero photo
Sarah Grimké photo
Ernesto Che Guevara photo
William James photo

“Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch.10

Austen Chamberlain photo
Matthew Arnold photo
Peter Tatchell photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Vannevar Bush photo
Brian Leiter photo
Charles Lyell photo
Marie-Louise von Franz photo
Noam Cohen photo

“Unlike in the United States, where freedom of expression is a fundamental right that supersedes other interests, Europe views an individual’s privacy and freedom of expression as almost equal rights.”

Noam Cohen (1999) American journalist

[Noam, Cohen, The New York Times, Times Articles Removed From Google Results in Europe, October 3, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/04/business/media/times-articles-removed-from-google-results-in-europe.html, October 29, 2014]

Jordan Peterson photo

“The idea of white privilege is absolutely reprehensible. And it's not because white people aren't privileged. We have all sorts of privileges, and most people have privileges of all sorts, and you should be grateful for your privileges and work to deserve them. But the idea that you can target an ethnic group with a collective crime, regardless of the specific innocence or guilt of the constituent elements of that group - there is absolutely nothing that's more racist than that. It's absolutely abhorrent. If you really want to know more about that sort of thing, you should read about the Kulaks in the Soviet Union in the 1920's. They were farmers who were very productive. They were the most productive element of the agricultural strata in Russia. And they were virtually all killed, raped, and robbed by the collectivists who insisted that because they showed signs of wealth, they were criminals and robbers. One of the consequences of the prosecution of the Kulaks was the death of six million Ukrainians from a famine in the 1930's. The idea of collectively held guilt at the level of the individual as a legal or philosophical principle is dangerous. It's precisely this sort of danger that people who are really looking for trouble would push. Just a cursory glance at 20th century history should teach anyone who wants to know exactly how unacceptable that is.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

Clarence Thomas photo
Enoch Powell photo
Viktor Orbán photo

“Naturally, when considering the whole issue of who will live in Europe, one could argue that this problem will be solved by successful integration. The reality, however, is that we’re not aware of any examples of successful integration… In countering arguments for successful integration, we must also point out that if people with diverging goals find themselves in the same system or country, it won’t lead to integration, but to chaos. It’s obvious that the culture of migrants contrasts dramatically with European culture. Opposing ideologies and values cannot be simultaneously upheld, as they are mutually exclusive. To give you the most obvious example, the European people think it desirable for men and women to be equal, while for the Muslim community this idea is unacceptable, as in their culture the relationship between men and women is seen in terms of a hierarchical order. These two concepts cannot be upheld at the same time. It’s only a question of time before one or the other prevails. Of course one could also argue that communities coming to us from different cultures can be re-educated. But we must see – and Bishop Tőkés also spoke about this – that now the Muslim communities coming to Europe see their own culture, their own faith, their own lifestyles and their own principles as stronger and more valuable than ours. So, whether we like it or not, in terms of respect for life, optimism, commitment, the subordination of individual interests and ideals, today Muslim communities are stronger than Christian communities. Why would anyone want to adopt a culture that appears to be weaker than their own strong culture? They won’t, and they never will! Therefore re-education and integration based on re-education cannot succeed.”

Viktor Orbán (1963) Hungarian politician, chairman of Fidesz
Maszlee Malik photo

“Kindness is a part of human nature, this is what we have forgotten in our educational system. We emphasize a lot on exams and test results that we forgot the very basic human element in every single individual – kindness.”

Maszlee Malik (1974) A Malaysian politician

Maszlee Malik (2018) cited in " Maszlee pledges to introduce more kindness into school system https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2018/10/01/need-for-wellrounded-youths-maszlee-pledges-to-introduce-more-kindness-into-school-system/" on The Star Online, 1 October 2018

Mike Vallely photo

“I felt it necessary to evolve entirely new concepts (of form and space and paintings) and postulate them in an instrument that could continue to shake itself free from dialectical perversions. The dominant ones, Cubism and Expressionism, only reflected the attitudes of power or spiritual debasement of the individual.”

Clyfford Still (1904–1980) American artist

Clyfford Still, interview with Ti Grace Sharpless, 1963; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 200
1960s

Erving Goffman photo
Walter Rauschenbusch photo

“Individualism implies a loosely knit social framework in which people are supposed to take care of themselves and of their immediate families only.”

Geert Hofstede (1928) Dutch psychologist

Source: Culture's consequences: International differences in work-related values (1980), p. 45.

Aldo Leopold photo
Charles Cooley photo
Philip Roth photo

“You rebel against the tribal and look for the individual, for your own voice as against the stereotypical voice of the tribe or the tribe's stereotype of itself. You have to establish yourself against your predecessor, and doing so can well involve what they like to call self-hatred. I happen to think that—all those protestations notwithstanding—your self hatred was real and a positive force in its very destructiveness. Since to build something new often requires that something else be destroyed, self-hatred is valuable for a young person. What should he or she have instead—self-approval, self-satisfaction, self-praise? It's not so bad to hate the norms that keep a society from moving on, especially when the norms are dictated by fear as much as by anything else and especially when that fear is of the enemy forces of the overwhelming majority. But you seem now to be so strongly motivated by a need for reconciliation with the tribe that you aren't even willing to acknowledge how disapproving of its platitudinous demands you were back then, however ineluctably Jewish you may also have felt. The prodigal son who once upset the tribal balance—and perhaps even invigorated the tribe's health—may well, in his old age, have a sentimental urge to go back home, but isn't this a bit premature in you, aren't you really too young to have it so fully developed?”

Nathan Zuckerman to Philip Roth
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)

Franz Kafka photo
Jane Roberts photo

“This conscious self is only one aspect of our greater reality, however; the part that springs into earthknowing. It can be called the "focus personality," because through it we perceive our three-dimensional life. It contains within it, however, traces of the unknown or "source self" out of which it constantly emerges. The source self is the fountainhead of our present physical being, but it exists outside of that frame of reference. We are earth versions of ourselves, beautifully turned into corporal experience. Our known consciousness is filtered through perceptive mechanisms that are a part of what they perceive. We are the instruments through which we know the earth. In other terms, we are particles of energy, flowing from the source self into physical materialization. Each source self forms many such particles or "Aspect selves" that impinge upon three-dimensional reality, striking our space-time continuum. Others are not physical at all, but have their existence in completely different systems of reality. Each Aspect self is connected to the other, however, through the common experience of the source self, and can come to some degree to draw on the knowledge, abilities, and perceptions of the other Aspects. Psychologically, these other Aspects appear within the known self as personality traits, characteristics, and talents that are uniquely ours. The individual is the particle or focus personality, formed by the intersection of the unknown self with space and time. We can follow any of our traits or emotions back to this source self, or at least to a recognition of its existence.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Adventures In Consciousness: An Introduction to Aspect Psychology (1975), pp.118-119

William O. Douglas photo
Arthur Schopenhauer photo

“Now if plurality and difference belong only to the appearance-form; if there is but one and the same Entity manifested in all living things: it follows that, when we obliterate the distinction between the ego and the non-ego, we are not the sport of an illusion. Rather are we so, when we maintain the reality of individuation, — a thing the Hindus call Maya, that is, a deceptive vision, a phantasma. The former theory we have found to be the actual source of the phaenomenon of Compassion; indeed Compassion is nothing but its translation into definite expression. This, therefore, is what I should regard as the metaphysical foundation of Ethics, and should describe it as the sense which identifies the ego with the non-ego, so that the individual directly recognises in another his own self, his true and very being. From this standpoint the profoundest teaching of theory pushed to its furthest limits may be shown in the end to harmonise perfectly with the rules of justice and loving-kindness, as exercised; and conversely, it will be clear that practical philosophers, that is, the upright, the beneficent, the magnanimous, do but declare through their acts the same truth as the man of speculation wins by laborious research … He who is morally noble, however deficient in mental penetration, reveals by his conduct the deepest insight, the truest wisdom; and puts to shame the most accomplished and learned genius, if the latter's acts betray that his heart is yet a stranger to this great principle, — the metaphysical unity of life.”

Part IV, Ch. 2, pp. 273 https://archive.org/stream/basisofmorality00schoiala#page/273/mode/2up-274
On the Basis of Morality (1840)

Stuart A. Umpleby photo

“The "second order cyberneticians" claimed that knowledge is a biological phenomenon (Maturana, 1970), that each individual constructs his or her own "reality" (Foerster, 1973) and that knowledge "fits" but does not "match" the world of experience”

Stuart A. Umpleby (1944) American scientist

von Glasersfeld, 1987
Stuart A. Umpleby (1994) The Cybernetics of Conceptual Systems http://www.itk.ntnu.no/ansatte/Gulbrandsoey_Kenneth/documents/papers/THE%20CYBERNETICS%20OF%20CONCEPTUAL%20SYSTEMS.pdf. p. 3

Carl Sandburg photo
Dominic Cadbury photo
William Bateson photo
Sri Aurobindo photo
Friedrich Hayek photo

“All economic activity is carried out through time. Every individual economic process occupies a certain time, and all linkages between economic processes necessarily involve longer or shorter periods of time.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

"Intertemporal Price Equilibrium and Movement in the Value of Money" (1928)
1920s–1930s

Jordan Peterson photo

“The structure of the lived experience of conscious individuals.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Other

Georg Simmel photo
Johannes Grenzfurthner photo

“Contemporary art -- the field we are usually working in because there's money -- is mostly concerned with systems or systematic concepts. In the context of their work, artists adapt models of individual art-specific or economic or political systems like in a laboratory, to reveal the true nature of these systems by deconstructing them. So would it be fair to say that by their chameleon-like adaptation they are attempting to generate a similar system? Well… the corporate change in the art market has aged somewhat in the meantime and looks almost as old as the 'New Economy'. Now even the last snotty brat has realized that all the hogwash about the creative industries, sponsoring, fund-raising, the whole load of bullshit about the beautiful new art enterprises, was not much more than the awful veneer on the stupid, crass fanfare of neo-liberal liberation teleology. What is the truth behind the shifting spheres of activity between computer graphics, web design and the rest of all those frequency-orientated nerd pursuits? A lonely business with other lonely people at their terminals. And in the meantime the other part of the corporate identity has incidentally wasted whole countries like Argentina or Iceland. That's the real truth of the matter.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

Interview on Furtherfield http://www.furtherfield.org/interviews/interview-johannes-grenzfurthner-monochrom-part-1

Roger Wolcott Sperry photo
Daniel Pipes photo
Friedrich Kellner photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Michelle Obama photo

“Every time I meet a child I think, who knows what’s going on in her life, whether she was just bullied or whether she had a bad day at school or whether she lost a parent — that interaction that we have with that individual, that child for that moment, could change their life … so we can’t waste this spotlight. It is temporary and life is short, and change is needed. And women are smarter than men.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

Speaking at a women's forum at the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington, alongside former first lady Laura Bush, as quoted in "Michelle Obama: ‘Women are smarter than men’" in The Washington Times (6 August 2014) http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/aug/6/michelle-obama-women-are-smarter-than-men/
2010s

“The individual, before it can determine itself, is determined by the relations in which it is enmeshed. “It is a fellow-being before it is a being.””

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 34, quote is from Institut für Sozialforschung

Tim O'Brien photo

“The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit.”

John D. MacDonald (1916–1986) writer from the United States

Travis McGee series, (1965)

Max Scheler photo
Gustav Stresemann photo

“We agree to recognise Lithuanian independence on condition that the desire of the Lithuanians for a military convention and a customs, monetary and postal union with Germany, communicated to us some time ago by a Lithuanian delegation, still remains. For to be candid, the idea of full independence for these peripheral countries seems to me to be purely theoretical and impracticable…The whole development of world politics shows that we have not only great and powerful individual countries like Germany on the one hand and Britain and France on the other, but associations of States fighting against each other…I do not believe in Wilson's universal League of Nations, I think that after the peace it will burst like a soap bubble. Great and powerful complexes of nations with hundreds of millions of inhabitants, armies of millions of men and exports amounting to thousands of millions, will be confronting each other. In the circumstances such small fractional nationalities will not be able to exist in complete independence, without seeking to lean on one side or the other. Just as there is no independent Belgium in the sense that it gravitates towards one side or the other, so it is not possible to conceive of a completely independent Lithuania, Balticum or Poland without that provisio.”

Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929) German politician, statesman, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate

1910s, Speech in the Reichstag, 18 March 1918

Thomas Jefferson photo
Wilt Chamberlain photo
Mukesh Ambani photo
William Ewart Gladstone photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Koenraad Elst photo

“One Western author who has become very popular among India’s history-writers is the American scholar Prof. Richard M. Eaton…. A selective reading of his work, focusing on his explanations but keeping most of his facts out of view, is made to serve the negationist position regarding temple destruction in the name of Islam. Yet, the numerically most important body of data presented by him concurs neatly with the classic (now dubbed “Hindutva”) account. In his oft-quoted paper “Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states”, he gives a list of “eighty” cases of Islamic temple destruction. "Only eighty", is how the secularist history-rewriters render it, but Eaton makes no claim that his list is exhaustive. Moreover, eighty isn't always eighty. Thus, in his list, we find mentioned as one instance: "1994: Benares, Ghurid army. Did the Ghurid army work one instance of temple destruction? Eaton provides his source, and there we read that in Benares, the Ghurid royal army "destroyed nearly one thousand temples, and raised mosques on their foundations. (Note that unlike Sita Ram Goel, Richard Eaton is not chided by the likes of Sanjay Subramaniam for using Elliott and Dowson's "colonialist translation.") This way, practically every one of the instances cited by Eaton must be read as actually ten, or a hundred, or as in this case even a thousand temples destroyed. Even Eaton's non-exhaustive list, presented as part of "the kind of responsible and constructive discussion that this controversial topic so badly needs", yields the same thousands of temple destructions ascribed to the Islamic rulers in most relevant pre-1989 histories of Islam and in pro-Hindu publications…. If the “eighty” (meaning thousands of) cases of Islamic iconoclasm are only a trifle, the “abounding” instances of Hindu iconoclasm, “thoroughly integrated” in Hindu political culture, can reasonably be expected to number tens of thousands. Yet, Eaton’s list, given without reference to primary sources, contains, even in a maximalist reading (i. e., counting “two” when one king takes away two idols from one enemy’s royal temple), only 18 individual cases…. In this list, cases of actual destruction amount to exactly two…”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2000s, Ayodhya: The Case Against the Temple (2002)

Ossip Zadkine photo
Carl R. Rogers photo
Daniel Goleman photo
Allen West (politician) photo
Colin Wilson photo
Nathaniel Hawthorne photo
Linus Torvalds photo
Richard Wilhelm photo

“Chinese is the easiest language when it is learned at ease, dwelling on its spirit rather than on the individual expression. But for inquisitive questioners, this language provides vain pitfalls.”

Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930) German sinologist

Chinesisch ist die leichteste Sprache, wenn sie unbefangen gelernt wird, vom Sinn her eher als vom Einzelausdruck. Aber für neugierige Frager bietet die Sprache eitel Tücken.
Die Seele Chinas. Berlin, Hobbing, 1926

Franklin D. Roosevelt photo
Samuel R. Delany photo
Walt Whitman photo
Jiddu Krishnamurti photo
Nicholas Serota photo

“The fact that the mean recurrence time is infinite implies that the chance fluctuations in an individual prolonged coin-tossing game are far removed from the familiar pattern governed by the normal distribution.”

William Feller (1906–1970) Croatian-American mathematician

Source: An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications (Third Edition), Chapter XIII, Recurrent Events. Renewal Theory. p. 314.

“Gordon Tullock, on the other hand, might be characterized as the somewhat cynical pragmatist, who set out to understand the world, not to change it. This side of Tullock is visible in his early paper on simple majority rule, and is perhaps most apparent in his work on rent seeking. These differences should not be pushed too far, however. Buchanan (1980) also contributed to the rent-seeking literature, and often has described public choice as “politics without romance.” One of the most dispiriting contributions to the public choice literature has to be Kenneth Arrow’s (1951) famous impossibility theorem. In a too little appreciated article, Tullock (1967b) demonstrated with the help of a somewhat torturous geometrical analysis, that the cycling that underlies the impossibility theorem is likely to be constrained to a rather small subset of Pareto-optimal outcomes, and thus Arrow’s theorem was “irrelevant,” a rather happy result, and one which anticipated work appearing more than a decade later on the uncovered set. In Chap. 10 of Toward a Mathematics of Politics, Tullock (1967a) engages in a bit of wishful thinking about constitutional design by describing how one could achieve an ideal form of proportional representation in a legislative body. He also was an early enthusiast of the potential for using a demand-revelation process to reveal individual preferences for public goods”

Dennis Mueller (1940) American economist

Tideman and Tullock 1976
James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and The Calculus (2012)

Glenn Beck photo

“This is a moment, quite honestly, that I think we reclaim the civil rights movement. It has been so distorted and so turned upside down because we must repair honor and integrity first, I tell you right now. We are on the right side of history. We are on the side of individual freedoms and liberties, and damn it, we will reclaim the civil rights moment. We will take that movement, because we were the people that did it in the first place.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

The Glenn Beck Program
Premiere Radio Networks
2010-05-26
Beck says his 8-28 rally will "reclaim the civil rights movement. … We were the people that did it in the first place"
2010-05-26
Media Matters for America
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201005260024
Walsh
Joan
Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin's unholy alliance
2010-08-28
Salon
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/joan_walsh/politics/2010/08/28/beck_and_palin_religious_heroes/index.html
reacting to Bertha Lewis of ACORN singing "We Shall Overcome" at an anti Arizona SB 1070 rally
2010s, 2010

Aung San Suu Kyi photo
Friedrich Engels photo
Moses Hess photo
Jean-Baptiste Say photo
Victor Klemperer photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Alain Aspect photo
David Gerrold photo