Alexander von Humboldt Quotes

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

The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to be like each other.

It is a great law of social development that the movement from slavery to freedom is also a movement from security to insecurity of maintenance.

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.

I have an intense dislike for artificial society. In France, one could lead a free life - to do what one wanted to do without interference or criticism from one's neighbors.

I find the earth to be a place of misery in which I am surrounded by the conformity that kills society.

Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.

You use your money to buy privacy because during most of your life you aren't allowed to be normal.

In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.

It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.

You know, our sense of individuality is just the number one target of civilization.

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

I'm not part of any movement; I don't like being fettered.

I think a lot of people have lost respect for the individual, you know, the individual, the person who doesn't conform.

Any society where it's a crime or a hassle to be different is a society based on psychological fascism.

Life is very, very short, and you can choose to live it how you want. You can choose to dumb yourself down and not express yourself just so you can fit in, just so people won't dislike you.

Big is bad - the corollary of Schumacher's small is beautiful. The centralized state, particularly the mass-society state of the 20th century, is inherently a failure: it is authoritarian and anti-liberty, imposing checks and laws on all individual actions; it is hierarchical and arbitrary, with power at the top and subservience for the great majority below; it is bureaucratic in order to function at all, but it functions poorly nonetheless because bureaucracies are always inefficient and clumsy and self-perpetuating; it is undemocratic, because it is too big to allow direct face-to-face decision making and substitutes various forms of representation, all of which take power from the individual.

At some period, however, of their history, almost every people, now civilized, have consisted, in majority, of slaves. A people in that condition require to raise them out of it a very different polity from a nation of savages.

The individualism of the Arab has been erased from this society.

However energetically society in general may strive to make all the citizens equal and alike, the personal pride of each individual will always make him try to escape from the common level, and he will form some inequality somewhere to his own profit.

“I would rather err with the majority than in my own way.” So thought Saint Augustine. I am of the reverse opinion.

The fear that individuality will be crushed out by the growing 'tyranny' of standardization is the sort of myth which cannot withstand the briefest examination.

One of the guiding beliefs of our consuming age is that we are all free and independent individuals. That we can choose to do pretty much what we want, and if we can't, then it's bad. But at the same time, co-existing alongside this, there is a completely different, parallel universe where we all seem meekly to do what those in power tell us to do.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.

There is no tyrant like custom, and no freedom where its edicts are not resisted.