Jonathan Raymond Quotes

I've always been opposed to groups. I can't believe the doctrine of group is going to work for every single person within the group.

The anarch wages his own wars, even when marching in rank and file

I'm a big fan of community, and I think independence is over-rated.

There's no such thing as society.

Off fall the wife, the mother, the lover, the teacher, and the violent artist takes over. I am I alone. I belong to no one but myself. I mate with no one but the spirit. I own no land, have no kin, no friend or enemy. I have no road but this one.

The individual is the true reality of life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called "society," or the "nation," which is only a collection of individuals.

It was also never wanting to be part of any group or movement or anything that was the done thing. I hated organization. When you have a group, you have a leader who is going to put down the rest of the group.

When there is no room for individualism in ballparks, then there will be no room for individualism in life.

Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.

Human beings are a social species. We like to hang together in groups, just like wildebeests, just like lions. Wildebeests don't hang with lions because lions eat wildebeests. Human beings are like that. We do what that group does that we're trying to identify with.

I am not in this world to live up to other people's expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine.

In America, it is difficult to be your own man.

First of all, whoever didn't want to be a member of this association or the other association, was branded, you know, like a dangerous individualist, you know, infected by the Western decadence, you know. So everybody joined.

I was not someone who participated in other people's castles.

I am very slow to warm. I've always been sort of a loner. I didn't play team sports. I am better one-on-one than in big groups.

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

I am definitely an individual.

Our society is not a community, but merely a collection of isolated family units.

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.

There is always the danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual. In making him more self-reliant, it may make him more self-sufficient.... It often makes an individual so insensitive in his relations to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone -- an unnamed form of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remedial suffering of 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.

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

I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know.

What is the basic unit of "self" in the expression "self-government?" How large does your group have to be before it can be a government unto itself? In fact, do you have to be part of a group at all?

In an over-organized society, the individual is altogether crushed out of existence. He gains the whole wealth of social thought around him and loses his own soul.