Sally Rooney Quotes

For traditional societies … the collective, the group, is more important than the individual, and empowering the individual is equated with dividing the society.

These groups within a society can he distinguished according as to whether, like an army or an orchestra, they function as a single body; or whether they are united merely to defend their common interests and otherwise function as separate individuals.

Ants can live together in solidarity and forget themselves in the community. In a normative capitalist society, everyone is an egoist. In the ants' civilization, you are part of the group; you don't live for yourself alone.

Far too many people, especially within evangelicalism, think that the individual is all that matters, and that the corporate dimension is a distraction or diversion. Of course Christianity is deeply personal for every single Christian; nobody gets lost in the kingdom of God. But you can't play that off against the corporate dimension.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

Those nations of artists, finding their own individualism, and kind of standing against the world: to me that's the ultimate nightmare. I want to get lost and diffused in the world.

He who would dare to undertake to establish a nation would have to feel himself capable of altering, so to speak, human nature, to transform each individual, who by his very nature is a unique and perfect whole, into a mere part of a greater whole, from which this individual would in a sense receive his life and his being.

We too often prefer the individual thrill to collective responsibility.

Americans are so individualistic, they do not realize their individualism is a communally derived value.

We talk about "rugged individualism" and "personal liberty." My dear friends, both of those disappeared from the earth the day the first colony of cave men held a conference around a community fire.

As Americans, we're raised with this idea of, 'We're number one.' As an individual, you absorb and you consume until you skyrocket to the top with your money and your whatever. That's not my philosophy. My philosophy is quite the opposite in that there's limited space, we have limited resources, and so it's not about the individual.

In the West, as well as some other parts of the world, the personal sense of ego tends to predominate, whereas in other areas, there is a more collective sense of ego. This collective ego emphasizes the 'we' rather than the 'I.'

And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man.

We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.

No man is an island. If you want to blame anybody for poisoning the world with that socialistic idea, blame John Donne.

Society is the union of men and not the men themselves.

The farther a society progresses, the more clearly the individual becomes the antithesis of the group.

The Chinese began with the assumption that the group is the fundamental unit of reality. Individuals? Sure, we can factor them out from their groups, but let us not think that they as individuals have any viability apart from their group.

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

The only real life is the collective life of the race; individual life has no existence except as an abstraction.

I don't envisage collectivism. There is no such animal, it is always individualism, sometimes the rest vote and sometimes they do not, and if they do they do and if they do not they do not.

I believe people think as a group more often than we might realize or care to admit. We like to believe that we act as individuals and nothing more, but time and again - in corporations and business, in politics and religion, in fashion and culture, and in friendships and social circles - we think and do as one.

Communities don't think, don't believe, don't want, don't have needs, don't have interests and don't make decisions. Only individuals have minds that generate desires and needs - and only individuals can make choices and decisions.

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

Islamophobia, in all its guises, seeks to minimise the importance of the individual and maximise the importance of the group. Yet our instinctive stance ought to be one of suspicion towards such endeavours. For individuals are undeniably real. Groups, on the other hand, are assertions of opinion.