Bill Bradley Quotes

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

Join cooperatively with one another, put aside self-interest, and take on service to the public …

All who think cannot but see there is a sanction like that of religion which binds us in partnership in the serious work of the world.

Private passions tire and exhaust themselves, public ones never.

There has to be a social commitment, a social consciousness that joins men together. On the basis of their coming together, they do not transgress against themselves and they do not transgress against others.

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

Throughout America's young history there has been a necessary tension between the individual and the group.

People who volunteer at the recycling center or soup kitchen through a church or neighborhood group can come to feel part of something 'larger.' Such a sense of belonging calls on a different part of a self than the market calls on. The market calls on our sense of self-interest. It focuses us on what we 'get.'

Liberals worry that what's best for the individual might not be better for the public at large. But that philosophy assumes something vicious about each and every one of us. It assumes we only care about ourselves.

Everyone thinks chiefly of his own, hardly ever of the public interest.

The love of individual freedom has stood in the way of the appreciation of social obligations.

Since men are social by nature they are meant to live with others and to work for one another's welfare

The individual is prior to society and society must be ordered to the good of the individual.

The object of Socialism is not to render the individual capable of living on his personal resources. That is the theory of radical individualism. Its object is to create in him a greater and greater sense of his dependence upon the state, and, at the same time, to inculcate in him the conviction that he is a part of it and that he has a duty and responsibility toward the state; and that only in so far as he fulfills this duty can he benefit by the advantages of a complete personal and social life.

We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community...Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own

The collective comes before the individual.

another tradition to politics, a tradition (of politics) that stretched from the days of the country’s founding to the glory of the civil rights movement, a tradition based on the simple idea that we have a stake in one another, and that what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart, and that if enough people believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done.

Citizen service is a repudiation of the principles upon which our country was based. We are all here for ourselves.

Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable.

I can't imagine a society with absolutely no solidarity. For me, it's a nightmare. And I don't want to live in a place like that.

Of all the fictions we heard last week in Tampa, the one I find most troubling is this: If we all just go our own way, our nation will be stronger for it. Because if we sever the threads that connect us, the only people who will go far are those who are already ahead.

In the past goodness was always a collective experience. Then goodness became privatised.

We must all assume out responsibilities to take the country forward.

In our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up or else all go down as one people.

The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.