top of page
.png){kind=small}
"What we ask is to be human individuals, however peculiar and unexpected. It is no good saying: "You are a little girl and therefore you ought to like dolls"; if the answer is, "But I don't," there is no more to be said."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Individualism quotes
"Notice how they'll accept anything except a man who stands alone. They recognize him at once...There's a special, insidious kind of hatred for him. They forgive criminals. They admire dictators. Crime and violence are a tie. A form of mutual dependence. They need ties. They've got to force their miserable little personalities on every single person they meet. The independent man kills them-because they don't exist within him and that's the only form of existence they know. Notice the malignant kind of resentment against any idea that propounds independence. Notice the malice toward an independent man."
"I am not only not going to be married, at present, but have very little intention of ever marrying at all."
"I am not made like any of those I have seen. I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different."
"My dear, I used to think I was serving humanity . . . and I pleasured in the thought. Then I discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents any attempt to serve it. So now I do what pleases myself."
"American Progressives have declared war on the sanctity and autonomy of the individual."
"Creator of indifferences is the motto I want for my spirit today. I'd like my life's activity to consist, above all, in educating others to feel more and more for themselves, and less and less according to the dynamic low of collectiveness. To educate people in that spiritual antisepsis which precludes contamination by commonness and vulgarity is the loftiest destiny I can imagine for the pedagogue of inner discipline that I aspire to be. If all who read me would learn " slowly, of course, as the subject matter requires " to be completely insensitive to the other people's opinions and even their glances, that would be enough of a garland to make up for my life's scholastic stagnation."
"Defy the central planners. Upend their designs for your life. Be a staunch individualist. Stand on your rights."
"A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others."
"The egotist in the absolute sense is not the man who sacrifices others. He is the man who stands above the need of using others in any manner. He does not function through them. He is not concerned with them in any primary matter. Not in his aim, not in his motive, not in his thinking, not in his desires, not in the source of his energy. He does not exist for any other man-and he asks no other man to exist for him."
"Society tells me to follow my own truth, but I don't let society tell me what to do. If you need someone to tell you that, chances are you're part of the crowd that will move on to the next fashion that comes around."
Explore more quotes by Dorothy L. Sayers
"Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of amusement than any other single subject."
"What women want as a class is irrelevant. I want to know about Aristotle. It is true that most women care nothing about him, and a great many male undergraduates turn pale and faint at the thought of him-but I, eccentric individual that I am, do want to know about Aristotle, and I submit that there is nothing in my shape or bodily functions which need prevent my knowing about him."
"As I grow older and older, And totter toward the tomb, I find that I care less and less, Who goes to bed with whom."
"Every woman is a human being-one cannot repeat that too often-and a human being must have occupation if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world."
"There certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks."
"Books... are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development."
"To learn six subjects without remembering how they were learnt does nothing to ease the approach to a seventh, to have learnt and remembered the art of learning makes the approach to every subject an open door."
"I suppose one oughtn't to marry anybody, unless one's prepared to make him a full-time job."Probably not; though there are a few rare people, I believe, who don't look on themselves as jobs but as fellow creatures."
"The planet's tyrant, dotard Death, had held his gray mirror before them for a moment and shown them the image of things to come."
bottom of page