Grover Cleveland Quotes

If I'd wanted to be an individual, I'd have taken up tennis.

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

If in previous decades large historic events drew people together and oriented them toward collective action, the recent double trend toward greater choice but less security leads the young to see their lives in more individual terms. Big events collectivize. Little events atomize.

With artists of my own generation there was at first no group identity - and never a clique.

If we reduce social life to the smallest possible unit we will find that there is no social life in the company of one.

Being put in a group, I hate that. I don't think anyone likes it. Everyone just wants to be their own person.

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

Group action -- yes; group thinking -- no.

When people are free to do as we please, they usually imitate each other.

In ideal form of social control is an atomised collection of individuals focused on their own narrow concern, lacking the kinds of organisations in which they can gain information, develop and articulate their thoughts, and act constructively to achieve common ends.

I don't really believe in the idea of the individual.

The American has dwindled into an Odd Fellow,-one who may be known by the development of his organ of gregariousness.

All mass movements avail themselves of action as a means of unification. The conflicts a mass movement seeks and incites serve not only to down its enemies but also to strip its followers of their distinct individuality and render them more soluble in the collective medium.

Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.

I'm a natural novelist. I'm interested in the person and the group, and how they mesh. And one of the ways I don't want them to mesh is for the person to be subsumed into the group.

I've never been much for becoming a member of a group.

The thing that can happen in a TV room is you can get 'teamthink': you can all go down a crazy path together.

The coming together of people I find obscene as a principle. It is not human. It is not a natural thing as some people would have us believe.

When we talk in company we lose our unique tone of voice, and this leads us to make statements which in no way correspond to our real thoughts.

In his essay 'Self-Reliance' Emerson wrote, 'Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.' The Apostle Paul reminds us that whoso would be a Christian must also be a a nonconformist. Any Christian who blindly accepts the opinions of the majority and in fear and timidity follows a path of expediency and social approval is a mental and spiritual slave.

Trapped. Sinking. Can't be myself. Made into what other people expect. Is that everyone's fate? Were the great individualists the products of their friends who wanted a great individualist as a friend?

Conformities are called for much more eagerly today than yesterday... skeptics, liberals, individuals with a taste for private life and their own inner standards of behavior, are objects of fear and derision and targets of persecution for either side... in the great ideological wars of our time.

Conformity is the ape of harmony.

The reason they want you to fit in... is that once you do, then they can ignore you.

People have to be atomized and segregated and alone. They're not supposed to organize, because then they might be something beyond spectators of action. They might actually be participants if many people with limited resources could get together to enter the political arena. That's really threatening.