Jonathan Swift Quotes

A community is an alibi for the failure of individual love.

I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals: for instance, I hate the tribe of lawyers, but I love Counsellor Such-a-one, and Judge Such-a-one: so with physicians - I will not speak of my own trade - soldiers, English, Scotch, French, and the rest. But principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth. This is the system upon which I have governed myself many years, but do not tell.

People are wonderful. I love individuals. I hate groups of people. I hate a group of people with a 'common purpose'. 'Cause pretty soon they have little hats. And armbands. And fight songs. And a list of people they're going to visit at 3am. So, I dislike and despise groups of people but I love individuals. Every person you look at; you can see the universe in their eyes, if you're really looking.

I'm not comfortable with just me, me, me. That's boring.

Nations are becoming less relevant in a world where everyone and everything is interconnected. The connections that matter most are again becoming more personal.

I like America, where believers eddy around each other like currents of air. Even our atheists are devout! To be an American is to be a believer. I don't have much faith in institutions, but I still believe in people.

It is hate that binds people together. Love is personal.

Freedom has been used throughout history to mean different things…. In the Civil War the North fought for individual freedom while the South fought for community freedom.

We prefer the well-being of our country over the well-being of an individual or group.

For fully developed imperialism, the individual no longer has value. He is valuable to it only as a member of the whole, as a soldier of an army.

Patriotism is not an abstract concept. It begins from one's own home. It buds out from the love for one's parents, spouses and children, the love for one's own home, village and workplace, and further develops into the love for one's country and fellow people.

The globalists, the Democrats, the collectivists, hate anybody who's conservative, anybody that believes in the individual. And, the fact is, those people promote individualism, nationalism, and that's why they've got to be eradicated. What a horrible world if the system is successful.

To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them.

When I think of people I am close to, I genuinely feel that I can include Josh Lyman, Toby Ziegler, C.J. Cregg and Sam Seaborn.

Each individual in a society is a nexus where innumerable relationships of this character intersect.

Society in its full sense . . . is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it.

One can't love humanity. One can only love people.

Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.

Once you admit that the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of the higher entity called society or the nation, most of those features of totalitarianism which horrify us follow of necessity

I love and treasure individuals as I meet them, I loath and despise the groups they identify or belong to.

It is said that people learn to hate each other because of little things ... not big ones. I know I have always learned to love because of little things ... I'm not at all sure that there are any big ones.

I never look at the masses as my responsibility. I look at the individual. I can love only one person at a time. I can feed only one person at a time. Just one, one, one.

It is difficult for the isolated individual to work himself out of the immaturity which has become almost natural for him.

No one is saved alone, as an isolated individual, but God attracts us looking at the complex web of relationships that take place in the human community. God enters into this dynamic, this participation in the web of human relationships.

The ones that hate you most tend to be the people you know