David Wong Quotes

I am not an individualist in the Western sense. Collectivism can become oppressive when it tries to dictate; the rights of the two should not clash.

How do we have a society that maximizes peace, civility and well-being for everyone? How do we have a system of individual rights in which people succeed by helping others improve their lives? We're a long way from that. So what, I mean, we got more to learn than we know, to me. So we need better ideas.

If one by one we counted people out For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long To get so we had no one left to live with. For to be social is to be forgiving.

For too long in this society, we have celebrated unrestrained individualism over common community.

There is a social need within our lives as human beings to have harmony.

The individual and society have waged a relentless and bloody battle for ages, each striving for supremacy, because each was blind to the value and importance of the other.

The good people of this world are very far from being satisfied with each other & my arms are the best peacemakers.

Communitarianism sows the seeds of conflicts between communities, and I don’t want my country to face conflicts between communities, I recognize only individuals. It is individual who have rights…

It's a human right to be able to have a relationship.

Each new generation needs to commit again to the foundations of our peaceful coexistence.

You learn a lot about people when you live together.

Individualism is at once an ethical-psychological concept and an ethical-political one. As an ethical-psychological concept, individualism holds that a human being should think and judge independently, respecting nothing more than the sovereignty of his or her mind; thus, it is intimately connected with the concept of autonomy. As an ethical-political concept, individualism upholds the supremacy of individual rights

No universal selfishness can bring social good to all.

My own sense as an American is that we have begun to experience the disadvantages of framing virtually all moral issues in terms of individual rights. American history has consisted of swings back and forth between rights talk on the one hand and talk of duties, responsibilities, and the common good on the other hand. Recent decades have seen a big swing toward rights, and conceived in very individualistic terms, which hasn't always been the case even with rights.

Without freedom you cannot have real peace.

The capacity for getting along with our neighbor depends to a large extent on the capacity for getting along with ourselves. The self-respecting individual will try to be as tolerant of his neighbor's shortcomings as he is of his own.

You cannot borrow half of who you are from someone else, yet people try to do it all of the time, they just call it a relationship!

Do I take the Gospel message of reconciliation and love into the places where I live and work?

The acceptance of corporatism causes us to deny and undermine the legitimacy of the individual as citizen in a democracy. The result of such a denial is a growing imbalance which leads to our adoration of self-interest and our denial of the public good.

We must all learn to live together as brothers. Or we will all perish together as foolsFor some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.

Human rights takes history out of justice.

If you are unwilling to defend your right to your own lives, then you are merely like mice trying to argue with owls. You think their ways are wrong. They think you are dinner.

Liberty is a better husband than love to many of us.

I do not seek the good of others as a sanction for my right to exist, nor do I recognize the good of others as a justification for their seizure of my property or their destruction of my life.

The problem with the old ideology was that it suppressed the individual by starting with society. But it is from a sense of individual duty that we connect the greater good and the interests of the community