Terry Pratchett Quotes

I discourage a cult of personality.

I suppose if there's a set of genes I have, it's detesting authority.

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

I'm not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.

The history of government is the history of two conflicting principles: one is the supreme importance of the State; the other is the supreme importance of the individual.

The individual and society have waged a relentless and bloody battle for ages, each striving for supremacy, because each was blind to the value and importance of the other.

The bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self.

We gradually become aware that we live in an environment where there is constant tension between authority and freedom.

Collectivism and freedom are mortal enemies. Only one will survive.

I think everyone should be their own individualized person.

I am not a communist first and an individualist second. I am an individualist first, and I don't mean this in the shallow, purely egotistical sense of self-interest and everyone else be damned. I mean this in the true sense of enlightenment, recovery of personality, and the full development of personality.

I don't think that the flesh is necessarily treacherous, evil, bad. It is cantankerous, and it is independent. The idea of independence is the key. It really is like colonialism. The colonies suddenly decide that they can and should exist with their own personality and should detach from the control of the mother country. At first the colony is perceived as being treacherous. It's a betrayal. Ultimately, it can be seen as the separation of a partner that could be very valuable as an equal rather than as something you dominate.

There's something about cats' self-sufficiency and their seemingly individualistic ways that I find compelling.

Freedom and independence form my character.

Intellectuals incline to be individualists, or even independents, are not team conscious and tend to regard obedience as a surrender of personality.

People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.

The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.

Honestly, orthodoxy concerns me about as much as it concerns your average jackrabbit. I only follow rules that take me where I want to go. If there aren't any rules, I make up my own and follow them strictly.

I think everybody wants to be their own person and be an individual.

When you live life for yourself it's hard on everyone. And that hasn't changed. For me, if anything, it's gotten worse.

My own opinion is enough for me. And I claim the right to defend it against any consensus, any majority anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line and kiss my ass.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.

A self-willed man has no other aim than his own growth.

As to the American tradition of non-meddling, Anarchism asks that it be carried down to the individual himself.

Every social war is a battle between the very few on both sides who care and who fire their shots across a crowd of spectators.