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Individualism   Listen
noun
Individualism  n.  
1.
The quality of being individual; individuality; personality.
2.
An excessive or exclusive regard to one's personal interest; self-interest; selfishness. "The selfishness of the small proprietor has been described by the best writers as individualism."
3.
The principle, policy, or practice of maintaining individuality, or independence of the individual, in action; the theory or practice of maintaining the independence of individual initiative, action, and interests, as in industrial organization or in government.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Individualism" Quotes from Famous Books



... because they are suggestive of the unrestricted paths that you may tread in selecting your themes and deciding on your treatment of them in your playlets. True, they dangerously represent the trend of "individualism," and a master of stagecraft may be individual in his plot forms and still be great, but the novice is very likely to be only silly. So read and weigh these several theories with care. Be as individual as you like in the choice of a theme—the more you express your individuality the better your work ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page

... put the measure in the way of enactment at the hand of the Chamber; it carried fresh and more rigorous legislation in hostility to clericalism; and, in general, it gave free expression to the unquestionable trend of the France of to-day away from the individualism of the Revolutionary period in the direction of the ideals of collectivism. The Briand ministry by which it was succeeded followed in the same lines, three of its members, indeed, being active socialists. ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg

... I find him greater when he can abolish himself and all heroes by letting in this element of reason, irrespective of persons, this subtilizer and irresistible upward force, into our thoughts, destroying individualism; the power is so great that the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... Code the father was not responsible for the son, and the crime of the father was no disgrace to the children. Together with other emancipations which have weakened paternal power, this system has led to the triumph of individualism, which is now permeating the whole of modern society. He who thinks on the things of the future sees the spirit of family destroyed, where the makers of the new Code have introduced freedom of will and equality. The Family ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac

... be remarked, by the way, that Rolle is not inclined to substitute individualism for the authority of the Church; a change which has been brought against some mystics. There is immense emphasis laid, all through his writings, on the importance of conduct. The penetrating analysis, ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole

... under these circumstances required no little individualism of purpose, and some defiance of social obligations. Her intimate friends were unable to comprehend her conduct, and she was alienated from most of them. Especially her friends in Coventry were annoyed at such a marriage, and were not reconciled with her for a long time, and not until they saw ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke

... discussed. What made the popularity of "Jane Eyre," but that a central question was answered in some sort? The question there answered in regard to a vicious marriage will always be treated according to the habit of the party. A person of commanding individualism will answer it as Rochester does,—as Cleopatra, as Milton, as George Sand do,—magnifying the exception into a rule, dwarfing the world into an exception. A person of less courage, that is, of less ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... given our scholars, the social and political offices which were once open to the winner of the highest prize, have been thrown upon the altar of modernity. They say it is a most wise move and leads to the greater individualism, which is now the battle-cry of China. The fault of the old examination, we are told, is the lack of original ideas which might be expressed by a student. He must give the usual interpretations of the classics. ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper

... certainly cannot right all this wrong, neither will he be so brash as to charge it all up to malicious employers, ignoring the process through which our vaunted individualism, our free-field-and-no-favor policy, our doctrine for the strong has disported itself. But is it not reasonable that the minister inform himself of this problem in all its fundamental phases and that he both follow and ardently encourage a public-school policy ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben

... ended the war!" "Home," for many of them was not at all distant—gallop a few miles, deposit the prize, return, catch up before Winchester! Wild courage, much manliness, much chivalry, ardent devotion to Ashby and the cause, individualism of a citizen soldiery, and a naive indiscipline all their own—such were Ashby's men! Not a few now acted upon the suggestion of the devil who tempts through horse flesh. In the dust they went by Steve ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... more or less accomplished. The father was a man of learning, a graduate of Yale and a clergyman. The mother was familiar with French and Italian, and no mean astronomer. Thus parented, it is not surprising that the Glastonbury sisters were of marked individualism as well as superior scholarship. They were more or less acquainted with Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and have made a translation of the Bible from these ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... effective centre, that they might be dissipated again, towards every side, in daring adventure alike of action and of thought. Variety and novelty of experience, further quickened by a consciousness trained to an equally nimble power of movement, individualism, the capacities, the claim, of the individual, forced into their utmost play by a ready sense and dexterous appliance of opportunity,—herein, certainly, lay at least one half of their vocation in history. The material conformation of Greece, a land of islands ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater

... the column is replaced because it is raised up from the ground. A man must be blind not to see that all the sovereignties in Europe are growing weak; on all sides confidence and affection are deserting them; sects and the spirit of individualism are multiplying themselves in an appalling manner. There are only two alternatives: you must either purify the will of men, or else you must enchain it; the monarch who will not do the first, must enslave his subjects or perish; servitude or spiritual unity is the only choice open to ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley

... chiefly to symbolize this simple, heroic metaphysic would scarcely have done for Virgil; it would certainly not have done for his time. It was eminently a time of social organization, one might perhaps say of social consciousness. After Sylla and Marius and Caesar, life as an affair of sheer individualism would not very strongly appeal to a thoughtful Roman. Accordingly, as has so often been remarked, the Aeneid celebrates the Roman Empire. A political idea does not seem a very likely subject for a kind of poetry ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie

... doughtiest son of the soil must needs admit that the farmer of the past, living secluded in his house or village, was provincial, narrow, bigoted and individualistic. Times are rapidly changing, however, and out of the old desolation of rural individualism there is arising the spirit of wholesome, virile co-operation, which has transformed the face of many a country district almost in the twinkling of an eye. Nowhere is this co-operative spirit better expressed than in the consolidated country schools, ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing

... is that he was different from certain brands of so-called liberals. Like many of them he was an individualist but not, as in the popular conception of that word, an eccentric. His individualism resided in his strong personality, whole and complete rather than partial. He had an immense scorn of the petty narrow-minded points of view. He said, "There is no one so narrow as the broad-minded liberal! Look out! Be sure that you do not develop a closed mind toward the other man's point of ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick

... turn of the fourth man came, Meissonier had concluded that the race must be won by one and one, and his belief in individualism was further strengthened by an order for a group of family portraits, with a goodly retainer ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard

... one cannot perform the duty of another, that hired soldiery cannot protect a state, but their own hearts and arms must be enlisted unless they would be buried in its ruins. It wakes up the dormant dynamical powers of courage and heroism, and checks for a moment the selfish individualism that was taking the life from ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... thinking; and the normal attitude of practically every person is to obey the customs and the laws, although often those laws leave to the individual a range of action not found in later civilized states. But as the sense of right and justice and the desire to promote the public welfare grow, individualism grows also. Each individual, thrown upon his own resources, learns to think and question and judge. In democratic states he learns to take upon himself the responsibility for his acts, and at length the view becomes ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks

... life; the more conscious we are in the pursuit of moral and spiritual good, the nearer we are to that kingdom of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost which we seek. Get out of the narrow individualism or atomism—for let us never forget that individual and atom are the same word—which threatens to dwarf and pulverize us, which keeps within our view only the narrow range of our own interests and defeats their true pursuit by the very intensity ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins

... requirements and developments explain why the Naval Wing and the Royal Naval Air Service tended towards individualism rather than cohesion. While the Military Wing, or Royal Flying Corps, progressed further as an organized fighting force, the Royal Naval Air Service, amongst the 100 odd aeroplanes and seaplanes on charge which were mainly of the Short, Sopwith, Avro, ...
— Aviation in Peace and War • Sir Frederick Hugh Sykes

... felt that each time I looked at my little bits of red wool I should remember my social duty, a duty which my leaning towards individualism makes me forget only too often. So I knew I was still free to cultivate my soul, having this final effort ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous

... few men of my acquaintance were more lucid and convincing in conversation, particularly when he addressed a sympathetic mind. This was notably the case when he was unfolding his ideas on the conflicting theories of Individualism and Socialism. If his conversations on this head could be printed in a book they would make difficult work even for the most ingenious apologists of Socialism. He was persuaded that no theory of Socialism could be put into successful practice without involving the loss of personal ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie

... hereafter they have duties towards that State the performance of which is the only rational ground of their possession of rights as against the State. E.g., in many of our slums we have the best examples of individualism run mad, of the conception that the individual is a law unto his private self, and that all government is something alien, something forced upon the individual from the outside and impinging upon his private ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch

... Political Economy is only the science of selfishness; Adam Smith is the prophet of individualism; grow rich per fas et nefas is its ultimate teaching. Such a judgment is evidence of much levity and little enlightenment. How could the man who conceived the study of human interests on so large a scale, the philosopher who acknowledged ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... his poems, notably 'The Ideal and Life', what seemed to be a message of aesthetic quietism; a message which appeared to say that the attainment of inward peace, freedom and harmony was the highest goal of human effort. Naturally enough the individualism and aestheticism of the Weimarian poets were not welcome doctrine to an excited generation that had caught a glimpse of an immense work to be done for the fatherland. The ever increasing pressure of social emotions made it seem a selfish and unmanly thing ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... witnessed a culmination of a long series of progressive changes which had been under way for centuries, and the flood time of a slowly but steadily rising tide of protest against the enslavement of the intellect and the limitation of natural human liberties by either Church or State. The flood of individualism which characterized the second half of the eighteenth century demanded outlet, and, denied, it rose and swept away ancient privileges, abuses, and barriers—religious, intellectual, social, and political—and opened the way for the marked progress in all lines which characterized the ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... Nietzsche advising the creative man to bite off the head of the serpent which is choking him and become "a transfigured being, a light-surrounded being, that laughed!" One might point to Stirner's absolute individualism or turn to Whitman's wholehearted acceptance of every man with his catalogue of defects and virtues. Some of these men have cursed each other roundly: Georges Sorel, for example, who urges workingmen to accept none ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann

... fascinating theory of individualism, too; no man should impose his will and no community its laws, on the individual. Laws were for slaves. Ethics were better ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... rather than a world leader. Claiming to believe in the dignity and worth of the human individual, the modern liberals who run our invisible government urge an ever-growing welfare-state which is destroying individualism—which has already so weakened the American sense of personal responsibility that crime rates have increased 98 percent in our land during the past ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot

... for civilization, however, is the opposite of a return to the individualism of Nature or to a primeval communism. It presupposes the highest mastery of man over matter and social unity among all mankind co-operating as ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit

... whom the public has no concern, women upon whom either the misfortune of circumstances or of a powerful individuality has fallen—is the most significant foreboding of the degeneration of a national character while yet half grown. It is individualism, which is a polite term for rampant selfishness, run mad, a fussy contempt and hatred for the traditions ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... communion which shall yet be a blessing to the race; and reliance upon higher powers in or out of the body does not mean that we sacrifice our own abilities, nor do we thus become exempt from responsibility. Quite the reverse. It is the arrogance of individualism against which we protest. In fact, there is no abiding strength of purpose apart from the dependence every well-ordered mind should accord to the Infinite Light and Wisdom and the beneficial services which His wise and loving ministering spirits can render to us if we ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita

... these contrasted sides of goodness is mirrored in the conflicting moral ideals of conservatism and radicalism, of socialism and individualism, which have never been absent from the societies of men, nor even, I believe, from those of animals. Conservatism insists on unity and order; radicalism on wealthy life, diversified powers, particular independence. ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer

... constitution as essentially antagonistic to the American, not as its type. I have accepted universal suffrage in principle, and defended American democracy, which I define to be territorial democracy, and carefully distinguish from pure individualism on the one hand, and from pure socialism ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson

... Senatorial policy in declaring war (1) with Philip of Macedon, (2) with Antiochus of Syria; but this is not the old religion. Use of prodigia and Sibylline oracles to secure political and personal objects; mischief caused in this way. Growth of individualism; rebellion of the individual against the ius divinum. Examples of this from the history of the priesthoods; strange story of a Flamen Dialis. The story of the introduction of Bacchic rites in 186 B.C.; interference of the Senate and Magistrates, and significance of this. ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler

... and indivisible is the human identity that even the influence of individualism and environments is overcome by the great universal processes of education, the great processes of mind quickening and mind development. In many of our best institutions there sit side by side the representatives ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... that the government should do as little as possible and should confine itself practically to the duties of the policeman. This principle has seemed always to express to the average mind that traditional individualism which is an inheritance of the Anglo-Saxon race. In America, in the middle of the nineteenth century, it reenforced that tradition of local independence which was strong throughout the West and doubly strong in the South. Then, too, the Democratic party still spoke the language of the theoretical ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson

... "that is perfectly true! Christianity was at first the most new, radical, original, anarchical force in the world—it was the purest individualism; it was meant to over-ride all human combinations by simply disregarding them; it was not a social reform, and still less a political reform; it was a new spirit, and it was meant to create a new kind of fellowship, the mere existence ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson

... volunteer no longer blanketed the hoardings and the walls of private buildings. Conscription had come. Every able-bodied man must now serve at the command of the government. England seemed to have greater dignity. The war was wholly master of her proud individualism, which had stubbornly held to its faith that the man who fought best was he who chose to fight rather than he who was ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... assimilates its immigrants with surprising rapidity. Through this narrow funnel they pour into the "melting pot," their racial characteristics already neutralized, their souls already inoculated with the spirit of individualism. Prepared as he was to accept with a good grace conditions as he found them, Peter Nichols was astonished at the ease with which he fitted into the niche that he had chosen. His room was on the eighteenth floor, to which and from which ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs

... without its charms, and it is small wonder that in all ages men of intellect have sought in some form of communistic association relief from the pressure of strenuous individualism. We may smile with condescension upon the busy sisters in their caps and gingham gowns, but, who knows, theirs ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy

... knew. Alone with his bruised ambitions, his hectored egoism, his watery aims. Alone and plotting the ruin of those who had dared bid him halt in his mad, destroying career. Alone, this high priest of the caste of absolutism, of the old individualism which is fast hurrying into the realm of the forgotten. Alone, and facing a new century, with whose ideals his own were utterly, stubbornly, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... that has no responsible place in the community; that regards itself as a purely isolated, unrelated, irresponsible unit,—an atom without affinities! The home can be, if it will, the most antisocial force in existence, for it can, if it will, exist practically for itself. That excessive individualism, which is responsible for so many evils in our country, has encouraged this isolation. The girl who finds herself without a productive place at home at the same time finds none of the fine inspiration which comes from fitting herself into a social scheme and helping to ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell

... are to be found in the spirit of individualism developed by the Renaissance, the tendency to free inquiry that manifested itself in the Protestant Reformation, and the general movement of the English churches of the seventeenth century toward toleration and rationalism. The individualism of modern thought ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke

... being too cruelly to the mere accidents of birth and fortune. Under such a system, in short, to those who have is given and from those who have not is taken away even that which they have. There are others again who still view individualism just as the vast majority of our great-grandfathers viewed it, as a system hard but just: as awarding to every man the fruit of his own labor and the punishment of his own idleness, and as visiting, in accordance with the stern but necessary ordination ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock

... weak mind from the strong mind is an equal duty, and a far more difficult task. So far we have only partially succeeded. In this difficulty lies the whole problem. Socialism, so far as it attempts to repress individualism, and reduce mankind to an evenness opposed to all natural laws, is suicidal of the best in favor of mediocrity. But so far as it attempts to protect that mediocrity and weakness from the superior minds of the best, it is only in line with the laws which ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford

... engineer friend represents is tenfold worse than witchcraft, measured by the same standards. If there is any lesson that human history teaches with compelling force, it is surely this: Every race which has yielded to the demon of individualism and the lust for gold and self-gratification has gone down the swift and certain road to national decay. Every race that, through unusual material prosperity, has lost its grip on the eternal verities of self-sacrifice and self-denial has left the lesson of its downfall ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley

... serio-comic vein exaggerates the follies of democracy which he also sees reflected in social life. To him democracy is a state of individualism or dissolution; in which every one is doing what is right in his own eyes. Of a people animated by a common spirit of liberty, rising as one man to repel the Persian host, which is the leading idea of democracy in Herodotus and ...
— The Republic • Plato

... perhaps, of the individualism and liberty of personal development, which, even for a Roman Catholic, were effects of the Reformation, that there was so much in Montaigne of the "subjective," as people say, of the singularities of personal ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... the Confucian cult the State Religion; but there is not the slightest doubt that in formally registering this veritable revolution in the secret stronghold of Chinese political thought, a Bastille has been overthrown and the ground left clear for the development of individualism and personal responsibility in a way which was impossible under the leaden formulae of the greatest of the Chinese sages. In defining the relationship which must exist between the Central Government and the provinces even more formidable ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale

... neglect of these plain considerations that the fanatical individualism [Note 21] of our time attempts to apply the analogy of cosmic nature to society. Once more we have a misapplication of the stoical injunction to follow nature; the duties of the individual to the state are forgotten, ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... of the Buddha stories which I reproduce at the end of this book, the little Hare (who is, I think, a symbol of nervous individualism) constantly says: "Suppose the Earth were to fall in, ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock

... boast that "I'm a shrewd observer, and will guess What books you doat on from your fav'rite mess," is a personal eccentricity, his attack on false criticism and his exhortation to judge for oneself are typical harbingers of late eighteenth-century individualism and ...
— Essays on Taste • John Gilbert Cooper, John Armstrong, Ralph Cohen

... not the strong point of Nonconformist churches. We pride ourselves on our individualism, and that is all very well. We believe in direct access of each soul to Christ, that men must come to Him one by one, that religion is purely a personal matter, and the firmness with which we hold this tends to make us weak in combined action. It cannot be truthfully denied ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... nobility and beauty of life, in the great ideas which are moulding society and welding communities together. It cannot be done in a year or a decade; but it ought to be the first aim of education to initiate the imagination of the young into the idea of fellowship, and to make the thought of selfish individualism intolerable. It is not perhaps the only end of education, but I can hardly believe that it has any nobler or ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various

... that a condition of the presentation of visions lies in the over-sensitiveness of certain tracks or domains of brain action and the under-sensitiveness of others, certain stages in a mental process being represented very vividly in consciousness while the other stages are unfelt; also that individualism is changed ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton

... is to guarantee individualism against the masses, on the one hand, and the masses against the individual, on the other. In society as now organized, the many are slaves to a few favored individuals in a community. I should dread the bondage of individuals ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman

... basic individualism was for Thoreau the foundation of all enduring social relations, and the dullest observer of twentieth century America can see that Thoreau's doctrine is needed as much as ever. His sharp-edged personality provokes curiosity and pricks the reader into dissent ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry

... got to do is just to list all the chaps and put a note to their play:—'Naylor minor must pass more. Football isn't the place for extreme individualism.' 'Ammersham shapes well as ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... Greek art is Fellowship. Perhaps there is no quality in it which is more instructive for our days than this. The extreme individualism which is the most remarkable characteristic of modern times lays the utmost stress on the right or the duty of an artist to express himself in his work, to work out his own vein of originality, to give to the world a rendering ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... own form of government by voluntary consent, or vote, among themselves; and, having it in his pocket, Williams might hope, on his return to America, to set up, in the polity of Rhode Island and its adjacencies, such an example of complete civil democracy combined with absolute religious individualism as the world had never yet seen. The Bloody Tenent might be left in England as an exposition of his theory in the sphere of Religion until this practical Transatlantic example of it should be ready! He had shrewdly taken care, however, to have the Patent in his pocket before issuing ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson

... power and influence. It stands solely for the development of the individual man. There is a germ of a great truth in this, but the development of the truth is lost sight of. Individual initiative is a good thing, and our institutions do develop it—and its consequences! There is a species of individualism, too, about a bulldog. When he takes hold he holds on. It may as well be noticed by the objectors that that is a characteristic much appreciated by American people. They, too, hold on. They remember, besides, a pregnant phrase of their fathers, who "ordained this Constitution," ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid

... other country. On strolling along the spacious squares and magnificent streets in which civilization displays all its marvels, you seek in vain for some fissure by which to introduce yourself into English society, which is thickly steeped in individualism. With letters of recommendation, if of high authority, you may, it is true, gain access to a family of the middle class; and, once received, you will be well treated. But what conditions you must fulfill to gain that! You must lead a ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various

... the last time, and found him in this almost crazy crisis of extreme individualism, where he hopelessly "passed up" everything—human society, love and friendship, all the things his warm and loving Irish heart really desired, I felt that here indeed was a complete expression of the spirit of revolt. It was so extreme that I and no one else ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood

... clinging to a native individualism and pride, preferred isolation to companionship with the other pieces of driftwood by which they were surrounded, and with which the summer season compelled a certain enforced contact. When the heat in the little dining-room grew unbearable, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... Mann and D.A. Thomas are incompetent as leaders of industry because they do not see that Labour is full of men who can do things like this. I am proud, over in my country across the sea, to be cousin to a nation that is still the headquarters—the international citadel—of individualism upon the earth. The world knows if England does not, that this kind of individualism is the most characteristic, the most mighty and impregnable Dreadnought against that ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... their good faith in its instinctive concentration upon, and in its practice of, those elements in their respective community's worship and teaching, which are true and good and originally revealed by God.[51] Thus we escape all undue individualism and all unjust equalization of the (very variously valuable) religious and philosophical bodies; and yet we clearly hold the profound importance of the single soul's good faith and religious instinct, and of the worship ...
— Progress and History • Various

... very smallest love and sympathy for art possesses ideas which are valuable to that art. From the tiniest seeds sometimes the greatest trees are grown. Why, therefore, allow these tender germs of individualism to be smothered by that flourishing, arrogant bay tree of tradition—fashion, authority, ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell

... initiative, breathes through his great constitutional decisions, but also that in being of the frontier Marshall escaped being something else. Had he been born in lowland Virginia, he would have imbibed the intense localism and individualism of the great plantation, and with his turn of mind might well have filled the role of Calhoun instead of that very different role he actually did fill. There was, indeed, one great planter with whom young Marshall was thrown into occasional contact, and that was his father's patron and ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin

... renewed life and vigour, of the friction of mind with mind, which evinces earnestness, and cannot fail to lead to increased activity and effort. The observations of a young Protestant pastor on this point are worth repeating. "Protestantism," said he, "is based on individualism: it recognises the free action of the human mind; and so long as the mind acts freely there will be controversy. The end of controversy is death. True, there is much incredulity abroad; but the incredulity is occasioned by the incredibilities ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles

... has always run to individualism, and yet there is none which is capable of conceiving and carrying out a finer ideal of discipline. There is nothing in Roman or Grecian annals, not even the lava-baked sentry at Pompeii, which gives a more sternly fine object-lesson ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle

... can go further still. Whence comes the idea that all measures inspired by the sentiment of solidarity are contrary to Nature's trend? Observe her carefully, and she will not give lessons only in individualism. Side by side with the struggle for existence do we not find in operation what Lanessan calls "association for existence." Long ago, Espinas had drawn attention to "societies of animals," temporary or permanent, and to the ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... it's worse than that, ten thousand times worse. She's jealous of your art! That's it! There you have it! She's jealous because she can't understand it, because it takes you away from her, because she can't share it. That's what's terrible about marriage—no liberty, no individualism, no seclusion, having to account every night for your actions, for your thoughts, for the things you dream—ah, the dreams! The Chinese are right, the Japanese are right. It's we Westerners who are all wrong. It's the creative only that counts. The woman should be subordinated, should ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson

... a long way with these Socialists, we are going to discover a new world of social relationships—and then, and then, like a mighty wave; will flow in upon us a renewed and more wonderful sense of the worth of the individual human soul. A new individualism, bringing with it, perhaps, some faint realization of our dreams of a race of Supermen, lies just beyond! Its prophets, girded with rude garments and feeding upon the wild honey of poverty, are already crying ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker

... of himself; that he should be honest in his dealings with others and charitable in the old-fashioned way to the unfortunate; but that it was no part of his business to join with others in trying to make things better for the many by curbing the abnormal and excessive development of individualism in a few. Now I do not mean that this training was by any means all bad. On the contrary, the insistence upon individual responsibility was, and is, and always will be, a prime necessity. Teaching of the kind I absorbed from both my text-books and my surroundings is a healthy ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... too. Sometimes it seemed that the conflict was over for him and that he had sailed into a sure and quiet haven where no storm could reach him again. All that he had lacked was his; independence was his and the possibility of developing his own individualism. The ghosts of the ancestors were laid; Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, was no longer a mold that sought to grasp him and turn him into something he was not and did not wish to be. The plan was proving itself, demonstrating ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland

... not the exclusive source of the evils which he does and suffers. To attribute to each individual, not only the responsibility of his acts, but the origin of the evil germs which exist in his soul, is the untenable proposition of a desperate individualism. There is evidently among men a common property in evil; Rousseau sees it clearly enough, but he makes vain efforts to find in the organization of society and in the condition of civilization the causes of pain ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville

... Augustan writers, too, it is easy to see how the enthusiasm for individualism, later to become one of the hallmarks of romanticism, actually sprang from an earlier faith in a God-directed universe of law and order. There is a kind of universal law of supply and demand, and the argument is simply that each link in the human ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill

... whole social nature. It becomes established as life grows more complex, as specific desires increase in number. Man is not, as thus seen in these genetic views of him, a self-tamed animal. He has not arrived at a precarious and unstable social condition out of a primitive individualism which is the essence of his warlike nature. On the other hand, he has not degenerated from some ideal pacific state. Ages ago he was already divinely human, and possessed those capacities both for cooeperation and antagonism out of ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge

... very lesson Christ teaches in these words. To find the life is the highest object of every man and the end for which he was created; yet this can be attained only by the losing of it for Christ's sake. Individuality can be preserved only by the sacrifice of Individualism. Let us break up this thought and consider it ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson

... and foundation of our plan is to escape from man-made laws, which are compounded of tyranny and injustice of the grossest kind, and to revert to the old, simple, patriarchal, family idea—the idea of holding all things in common, of abolishing individualism and inequality of every description, and of submitting only to such simple laws as are manifestly for the benefit and advantage of all. Besides, who will there be to punish us for our so-called ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood

... uniformity; and evil is got rid of by sacrificing all that is excellent, remarkable, extraordinary. Everything becomes less coarse but more vulgar. The epoch of great men is passing away; the epoch of the ant-hill is upon us. The age of individualism is in danger of having no real individuals. Things are certainly ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... British Empire took the war as business, were ready to disturb its daily life, alter its daily habits, to throw on the scrap-heap its sacred individualism, and do and live for the national cause, no one doubts but we could win this war so as to avoid an inconclusive peace. Some of us were talking to a middle-aged British merchant. We had left our fellows in France cheerfully ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean

... strange that the Indians should so emphasize their national individualism at this particular time, inasmuch as six of them, the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, and Caddo, professing to be still in strict alliance with the Southern States, had formed an Indian confederacy, had collectively re-asserted their ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel

... our kings like kings," smiled the other. "And, at the same time, we encourage our butchers to be really butchers and to glory in it. Law and liberty, you see. Absolute discipline and the cultivation of individualism. No republican stew-pot, you see, in which ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson

... says: "Manhood Suffrage in America may seem to result, historically, from the general average equality of social conditions among the inhabitants of the Thirteen States. But it may also be deduced as a philosophical necessity from the Idea of Individualism, which became the core of the Federal Union. This idea, at first suggested only for men, has, little by little, spread ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson

... great danger to-day to the art of singing, and especially to the art of beautiful tone-production, which lies at the root of all beautiful singing, is the modern worship of individualism, of the ability of a person simply to do things differently from some one else, instead of more artistically, so that we are beginning to attach more importance to whims and personality than to observance of the canons of true art. It is only when the individual has ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller

... personal tolerance, constantly break out against the two faiths that are rivals to his own; and to them he attributes all the faults of art and all the vices of humanity. Each has its offence. Protestantism is made responsible for the extremes of individualism;[146] and Judaism, for the absurdities of its customs and the weakness of its moral sense.[147] I do not know which of the two is the more soundly belaboured; the second has the privilege of being ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland

... people, and Society has no support but Egoism. Every individual believes in himself. For us the future means egoism; further than that we cannot see. The great man who shall save us from the shipwreck which is imminent will no doubt avail himself of individualism when he makes a nation of us once more; but until this regeneration comes, we bide our time in a materialistic and utilitarian age. Utilitarianism—to this conclusion we have come. We are all rated, not at our just worth, but according to our social importance. People ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac

... developed in antiquity from those prevailing in modern times. The close association, nay, the inseparable bond, between religion and the state is only one of several determining factors that might be adduced, while the small scope permitted to individualism in matters of religious belief and practice in a country like Babylonia or Assyria was fraught with such peculiar results that all comparisons, even with other religions of antiquity, could only obscure ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow

... INDIVIDUALISM, the name given to a social system which has respect to the rights of the individual as sovereign, and is strictly ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... Socialist movement, which began to spread just as he took his seat; and being assiduous in Parliament, he was drawn more and more from "the Clubs," where his libellers and detractors wagged their tongues to some purpose. His strong individualism, as well as his practical good sense, made him bitterly hostile to the mildest proposals for putting the people's industrial interests into the hands of Government departments. And being a man of most positive quality, it was natural that he should excite the ...
— Reminiscences of Charles Bradlaugh • George W. Foote

... touched by the fraternal dream of a new golden age which he had found in Bache's humanitarian Communism. And indeed even Janzen had momentarily shaken him by his fierce confidence in the theory of liberative Individualism. But afterwards he had found himself out of his depth; and each and every theory had seemed to him but part of the chaotic contradictions and incoherences of humanity on its march. It was all a continuous ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... plan. He wondered glumly if that was better for men who were pitted against space. The rigid discipline sheltered them. They didn't have to think in a medium that might be too huge for their brains and emotions. Maybe it was more practical than rough-and-tumble individualism. He had a bitter picture of the whole solar system without a free mind in its whole extent—that is, if another ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun

... came, did nothing to diminish this individualism of the religious outlook, but rather accentuated it. The whole emphasis of Protestantism was thrown upon the life of the individual soul in relation to GOD, to the comparative neglect of the importance of the conception ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson

... continue to demand more pay, and employers will continue to oppose them. This is the key-note to laissez faire,—everybody for himself and devil take the hindmost. It is upon this that the rampant individualist bases his individualism. It is the let-alone policy, the struggle for existence, which strengthens the strong, destroys the weak, and makes a finer and more capable breed of men. But the individual has passed away and the group has come, ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London

... side of the same doctrine, the insistence on equality or impartiality between man and man. The common utility which Bentham considers is the happiness experienced by a number of individuals, all of whom are reckoned for this purpose as of equal value. This is the radical individualism of the Benthamite creed, to be set against that socialistic tendency which struck ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse

... not by socialism, but by individualism, that anything has been done towards the achievement of knowledge, and the advancement of society. It is the will and determination of individual men that impels the world forward in art, in science, and in all the ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles

... will be easy to prevent such a commission from usurping power.[3] Paul Brousse, Guillaume, and others opposed this view with such heat, however, that Hales was forced to respond: "I combat anarchy because the word and the thing that it represents are the synonyms of dissolution. Anarchy spells individualism, and individualism is the basis of the existing society that we desire to destroy.... Let us suppose, for example, a strike. Can one hope to triumph with an anarchist organization? Under this regime each one, being able to do what he pleases, can, according to his will, work or not work. The general ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter

... might have appealed profoundly. But Isaac Hecker's problems were at this time mainly social; as, indeed, to use the word in a large sense, they remained until the end. Now, Protestantism is essentially unsocial, being an extravagant form of individualism. Its Christ deals with men apart from each other and furnishes no cohesive element to humanity. The validity and necessity of religious organization as a moral force of Divine appointment is that one of the Catholic principles which it has from the beginning most ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott

... predecessor. The form into which he threw his questions gave them an eternal significance Locke can perhaps hardly claim. He understood the organic character of the State, where Locke was still trammelled by the bonds of his narrow individualism. It is yet difficult to see that the contribution upon which Rousseau's fame has mainly rested is at any point a real advance upon Locke. The general will, in practical instead of semi-mystic terms, really means the welfare of the community ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski

... strength and the weakness of Spain. This intense individualism, born of a history whose fundamentals lie in isolated village communities—pueblos, as the Spaniards call them—over the changeless face of which, like grass over a field, events spring and mature and ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos

... Calvinists have written much against the "craftiness" of Charles IX.; but travel through France, see the ruins of noble churches, estimate the fearful wounds given by the religionists to the social body, learn what vengeance they inflicted, and you will ask yourself, as you deplore the evils of individualism (the disease of our present France, the germ of which was in the questions of liberty of conscience then agitated),—you will ask yourself, I say, on which side were the executioners. There are, unfortunately, as Catherine herself says in the third division ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac

... have anchored their starry souls to shine thence upon men for all time, is no uncommon thing. It is more the rule than the exception: but one would hardly say that in going further they have gone higher, or ended greater. The footpath of pioneer individualism must inevitably become the highway of the race. Every ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard



Words linked to "Individualism" :   school of thought, individualist, individual, distinctiveness, belief, commonality, philosophical system, rugged individualism, specialness, trait, laissez faire, doctrine, singularity, uniqueness, ism, individuation



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