Individual Choice Quotes & Sayings

The sanctity of a woman's right to control her own destiny is a moral force of its own ... I came to realize that the question of choice is to be answered, not by the state, but by the individual. — Dick Gephardt

China has no choice but to emulate the power of America's founding ideas and its journey through the universal values of democratic freedom and individual rights. — Patrick Mendis

What can a state institution teach us? In what way can I be reformed by a penal colony and you by, say, Russian TV Channel 1? In his Nobel lecture, Joseph Brodsky said, 'The more substantial an individual's aesthetic experience is, the sounder his taste, the sharper his moral focus, the freer - though not necessarily the happier - he is.' We in Russia once again find ourselves in a situation where resistance, especially aesthetic resistance, becomes the only viable moral choice as well as a civic duty." Nadya — Masha Gessen

Sadism dominates the culture. It runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs, is at the core of pornography, and fuels the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice and diminishing the individual to force him or her into an ostensibly harmonious collective. This hypermasculinity has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our lack of compassion for our homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed, and the sick ... We accept the system handed to us and seek to find a comfortable place within it. We retreat into the narrow, confined ghettos created for us and shut our eyes to the deadly superstructure of the corporate state. — Chris Hedges

In a dynamic, decentralized system of individual choice and responsibility, people do not have to trust any authority but their own. — Virginia Postrel

The choice is between two ways of life: between individual liberty and State domination; between concentration of ownership in the hands of the State and the extension of ownership over the widest number of individuals; between the dead hand of monopoly and the stimulus of competition; between a policy of increasing restraint and a policy of liberating energy and ingenuity; between a policy of levelling down and a policy of opportunity for all to rise upwards from a basic standard. [WOLVERHAMPTON, 23 JULY 1949] — Winston S. Churchill

I think when we make choices - for
each choice is individual of the choices we have made before - we must examine not
only our reasons for making them but what result they will have, and whether good people will be hurt by our decisions. — Cassandra Clare

Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice - the power of change, the essential function of life. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Homes, Gamache knew, were a self portrait. A person's choice of color, furnishing, pictures, every touch revealed the individual. God, or the devil, was in the details. And so was the human. Was it dirty, messy, obsessively clean? Were the decorations chosen to impress, or were they a hodgepodge of personal history? Was the space cluttered or clear? He felt a thrill every time he entered a home during an investigation. — Louise Penny

The freedom to own and carry the weapon of your choice is a natural, fundamental, and inalienable human, individual, civil, and Constitutional right - subject neither to the democratic process nor to arguments grounded in social utility. — L. Neil Smith

After all, how could you exercise choice if you didn't have a clue who you were? Labels weren't going to do it, titles like "mahmen" or "shellan" weren't really going to help you. You needed to dig into yourself and find out how to fill your hours with pursuits that were meaningful to you and for you, as a person, an individual. Too — J.R. Ward

Each individual has their own opinions about whether war is an answer to any problems. Personally I think it's a waste of time, but I think more importantly, that it's is an issue that we haven't had any say in. That's why I feel so strongly about it. I don't feel like we've really been given any choice in this matter. I think if you had a referendum tomorrow, Tony Blair would have no choice but to call off the war. — Damon Albarn

Legalize the right to choose wrong.
Legalize individual liberty. — A.E. Samaan

The result is one of the greatest paradoxes of modern history: that an economic system designed to offer infinite choice to the individual has ended up homogenizing humanity. — Niall Ferguson

In a sense technology is a tool of sort of individual choice, individual creativity, individual empowerment, individual access. My kids will never understand that it used to be kind of hard to access and find things, and know what the world knows and see what the world sees. Yet it becomes easier and easier every day. — Steve Ballmer

Once you accept the fact that people have 'individual choices' and they're 'free' to make those choices. Free to make choices means without being influenced and I can't understand that at all. All of us are influenced in all our choices by the culture we live in, by our parents, and by the values that dominate. So, we're influenced. So there can't be free choices. — Jacque Fresco

Freedom of religion means the right of the individual to choose and to adhere to whichever religious beliefs he may prefer, to join with others in religious associations to express these beliefs, and to incur no civil disabilities because of his choice ... — Joseph Leon Blau

Morality is not defined and cannot be defined by individual choice. — Rush Limbaugh

Any group or "collective," large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members. In a free society, the "rights" of any group are derived from the rights of its members through their voluntary individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking ... A group, as such, has no rights. — Ayn Rand

Fiction is an antidote, a reminder of the power of individual choice. Every novel has at its core a choice by at least one of its protagonists, reminding the reader that she can choose to be her own person, to go against what her parents or society or the state tell her to do and follow the faint but essential beat of her own heart. — Azar Nafisi

The greatest satisfaction you can obtain from life is your pleasure in producing, in your own individual way, something of value to your fellowmen. That is creative living! For you, life can be a succession of glorious adventures. Or it can be a monotonous bore.
Take your choice! — Neil Gaiman

Before Bush, I used to think that the choice of president really didn't matter, that the system kind of ran on its own- that whatever they said during the campaign, the system of checks and balances was really bigger than any individual. But that is what has been so chilling about seeing some of the decisions that have been made unilaterally over the past eight years. — Ron Howard

The rabbi's point was clear: if you can never evade the watchful eyes of a supreme authority, there is no choice but to follow the dictates that authority imposes. You cannot even consider forging your own path beyond those rules: if you believe you are always being watched and judged, you are not really a free individual. All oppressive authorities - political, religious, societal, parental - rely on this vital truth, using it as a principal tool to enforce orthodoxies, compel adherence, and quash dissent. — Anonymous

Mind control is the process by which individual or collective freedom of choice and action is compromised by agents or agencies that modify or distort perception, motivation, affect, cognition and/or behavioral outcomes. It is neither magical nor mystical, but a process that involves a set of basic social psychological principles. Conformity, compliance, persuasion, dissonance, reactance, guilt and fear arousal, modeling and identification are some of the staple social influence ingredients well studied in psychological experiments and field studies. In some combinations, they create a powerful crucible of extreme mental and behavioral manipulation when synthesized with several other real-world factors, such as charismatic, authoritarian leaders, dominant ideologies, social isolation, physical debilitation, induced phobias, and extreme threats or promised rewards that are typically deceptively orchestrated, over an extended time period in settings where they are applied intensively. — Steven Hassan

I'm for absolute autonomy of the individual, and an adult, competent woman has absolute autonomy. It's her choice. — Jack Kevorkian

when does an electron know when to jump, and how does it decide where to jump? Reasonably enough, Rutherford wanted to know what underlying process controlled the quantum jumping: "Bohr's answer was remarkable. Bohr suggested that the whole process was fundamentally random, and could only be considered by statistical methods: every change in the state of an atom should be regarded as an individual process, incapable of more detailed description. We are here so far removed from a causal description that an atom may in general even be said to possess a free choice between various possible transitions. — Andrew Thomas

I won't use abortion as a litmus test with a pro-choice individual. Someone that is an activist on the abortion issue, I think, goes outside the pale, and I cannot support an activist on the abortion issue. — Ken Buck

No one is born a sprinter. We all learn to push ourselves up from the floor and then balance before taking that first, wobbly step. It is an individual choice where to go from there. — Richelle E. Goodrich

The goddess is not an out-there force among the far stars or beyond death, but is here and now and living. In philosopher Mary Daly's concept of active creation, she is a verb rather than none and is women's Be-ing. Since the goddess is everyone within and all around us, the powers of divinity and creation are both individual and shared by all. She is the power to make of women's lives what women will. With the tenant, "Thou Art Goddess", free of choice is a central issue; women take charge of who they are and what they do, not with blame or guilt, but with responsibility for their actions and choices. — Diane Stein

There are hard choices to be made in balancing the country's security and an individual's liberties. But it is a choice that has to be faced. — Charles Kennedy

When we deny the poor and the vulnerable their own human dignity and capacity for freedom and choice, it becomes self-denial. It becomes a denial of both our collective and individual dignity, at all levels of society. — Jacqueline Novogratz

The change we seek for our nation is not the choice of an individual but must be the calling of a country. — Cory Booker

Though the elite have been opened, and have opened themselves to the world, the world has not opened to all. Access is not the same as integration. But what is crucial is that no one is explicitly excluded. The effect is to blame non-elites for their lack of interest. As we have seen, the result of this logic is damning. The distinction between the elites and the rest of us appears to be a choice. It is cosmopolitanism that explains elite status to elites and closed-mindedness that explains those who choose not to participate. What matters are individual attributes and capacities, not durable inequalities. From this point of view, those who are not successful are not necessarily disadvantaged; they are simply those who have failed to seize the opportunities afforded by our new, open society. — Shamus Rahman Khan

No identity is fully chosen by the individual, just as no identity is fully determined by forces external to the individual. This endless interplay between constraint and choice means that identities are necessarily dynamic, emergent, and contextual rather than static, predetermined, and immutable. — Julie Tetel Andresen

The idea that each individual has intrinsic, God-given value and is of infinite worth quite apart from any social contribution - an idea most pagans would have rejected as absurd - persists today as the ethical basis of western law and politics. Our secularized western idea of democratic society owes much to that early Christian vision of a new society - a society no longer formed by the natural bonds of family, tribe, or nation but by the voluntary choice of its members. — Elaine Pagels

Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, and responsibility for the arrangement of our own life according to our own conscience, is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily recreated in the free decision of the individual. Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one's own conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to bear the consequences of one's own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name. — Friedrich Hayek

In all the great periods of the drama perfect freedom of choice and subject, perfect freedom of individual treatment, and an audience eager to give itself to sympathetic listening, even if instruction be involved, have brought the great results. — George Pierce Baker

I believe the Federal government has grown out of control, threatening the Rights, Liberties, and Property of the People.
This is being done at the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial level. This is in direct opposition to the Constitution and the Founding Fathers vision for the Federal government.
Because I believe this, today I exercised my right as a Free Citizen, and did not visit the White House. This was not about politics or party, as in my opinion both parties are responsible for the situation we are in as a country. This was about a choice I had to make as an INDIVIDUAL.
This is the only public statement I will be making on this topic. TT — Tim Thomas

Dostoevsky's work contains no evolution of thought, not even within the boundaries of the consciousness of individual heroes (with very rare exceptions). Semantic material is always given to the hero's consciousness all at once and in its entirety, and given not as individual thoughts and propositions but as the semantic orientations of whole human beings, as voices; it remains only to make a choice among them. — Mikhail Bakhtin

Another example is the modern political order. Ever since the French Revolution, people throughout the world have gradually come to see both equality and individual freedom as fundamental values. Yet the two values contradict each other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off. Guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short-changes equality. The entire political history of the world since 1789 can be seen as a series of attempts to reconcile this contradiction. Anyone who has read a novel by Charles Dickens knows that the liberal regimes of nineteenth-century Europe gave priority to individual freedom even if it meant throwing insolvent poor families in prison and giving orphans little choice but to join schools for pickpockets. Anyone who has read a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn knows how Communism's egalitarian ideal produced brutal tyrannies that tried to control every aspect of daily life. — Yuval Noah Harari

The usual marriage in traditional cultures was arranged for by the families. It wasn't a person-to-person decision at all ... In the Middle Ages, that was the kind of marriage that was sanctified by the Church. And so the troubadour idea of real person-to-person Amor was very dangerous ... It is in direct contradiction to the way of the Church. The word AMOR spelt backwards is ROMA, the Roman Catholic Church, which was justifying marriages that were simply political and social in their character. And so came this movement validating individual choice, what I call following your bliss. — Joseph Campbell

To ask any parent to suffer the loss of a child is to ask more than any parent can possibly give. But to deny any individual the right to walk the path they have chosen, because we cannot imagine our lives without them, carries a heavy price. You have never known this because you have never faced this choice. You've never had to sacrifice anything, because of your power to alter reality to suit your whims. I understand this truth. We mortals have tried to soften it in platitudes. 'The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.' 'Death before dishonor.' In the end, nothing makes it easier to accept. I've given my life once for those I love, and I'm about to do it again. To have made any other choice was to grant fear dominion. Your son is a remarkable individual. Don't ask him to be less than he is. He has made his choice. — Kirsten Beyer

I think it's totally up to the individual if they'd like a private life or if they'd like to be in the public eye - it's a choice you can make. — Jade Jagger

The Third Way is simply a different route to the same destination. Ultimately, the choice is always between individual human liberty and the power of government to control our lives. — Ed Crane

Numerous are the academic chairs, but rare are wise and noble teachers. Numerous and large are the lecture halls, but far from numerous the young people who genuinely thirst for truth and justice. Numerous are the wares that nature produces by the dozen, but her choice products are few.
We all know that, so why complain? Was it not always thus and will it not always thus remain? Certainly, and one must take what nature gives as one finds it. But there is also such a thing as a spirit of the times, an attitude of mind characteristic of a particular generation, which is passed on from individual to individual and gives its distinctive mark to a society. Each of us has to his little bit toward transforming this spirit of the times. — Albert Einstein

The very idea of penalizing based on propensities is nauseating. To accuse a person of some possible future behavior is to negate the very foundation of justice: that one must have done something before we can hold him accountable for it. After all, thinking bad things is not illegal, doing them is. It is a fundamental tenet of our society that individual responsibility is tied to individual choice of action. [ ... ] Were perfect predictions possible, they would deny human volition, our ability to live our lives freely. Also, ironically, by depriving us of choice they would exculpate us from any responsibility. — Viktor Mayer-Schonberger

No matter how hard we try to reduce everything to deterministic brain chemistry, no matter how hard we try to reduce behavior to the sort of herd instinct that is captured in big data, no matter how hard we strive to replace sin with nonmoral words, like "mistake" or "error" or "weakness," the most essential parts of life are matters of individual responsibility and moral choice: whether to be brave or cowardly, honest or deceitful, — David Brooks

I dream of a society that is continuously creating knowledge, where each individual is a part of this creation, where youngsters can pursue courses with freedom of choice, where technology is used for universal access of education and yet the importance of the Guru is retained. — Narendra Modi

It is impossible for us to make any real advance until we take to heart this great truth, that without freedom of choice, without freedom of action, there are not such things as true moral qualities; there can only be submissive wearing of the cords that others have tied round our hands. — Auberon Herbert

As for loving woman, I have never understood why some people had a fit. I still don't. It seems fine to me. If an individual is productive responsible, and energetic, why should her choice in a partner make such a fuss? The government is only too happy to take my tax money and yet they uphold legislation that keeps me a second class citizen. Surely, there should be a tax break for those of us who are robbed of full and equal participation and protection in the life of our nation. — Rita Mae Brown

Individual web pages as they first appeared in the early 1990s had the flavour of person-hood. MySpace preserved some of that flavour, though a process of regularized formatting had begun. Facebook went further, organizing people into multiple-choice identities while Wikipedia seeks to erase point of view entirely. If a church or government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian, but when technologists are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh, and inventive. People accept ideas presented in technological form that would be abhorrent in any other forms — Jaron Lanier

Compassion is an act of tolerance where kindness and forgiveness reign. When we make the compassionate choice, we enhance the dignity of each individual, which is the very essence of loving them. — Leo Buscaglia

Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions ... Liberty and responsibility are inseparable. — Friedrich Hayek

The economic freedom which is the prerequisite of any other freedom cannot be the freedom from economic care which the socialist promise us, and which can be obtained only by relieving the individual at the same time of the necessity and of the power of choice: it must be the freedom of economic activity which, with the right of choice, inevitably also carries the risk and the responsibility of that right — Friedrich August Von Hayek

Maybe what has to happen is that the individual must allow himself to be swept along, must find himself in the stream of no-choice, the single direction. This is what makes things inevitable. You use the restrictions and penalties they invent to make yourself stronger. History means to merge. The purpose of history is to climb out of your own skin. (101) — Don DeLillo

The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual. — Herbert Marcuse

I deliberately went to boarding school. It was my choice. My mum was abroad and I wanted to wean myself off being dependent. It was a very important time for me to be able to create my own individual, independent life; just as a way of growing up. — Alice Englert

[Henry James'] essay's closing lines can either be read neutrally or as a more purposeful wish that this mystery [of Shakespeare's authorship] will one day be resolved by the 'criticism of the future': 'The figured tapestry, the long arras that hides him, is always there ... May it not then be but a question, for the fullness of time, of the finer weapon, the sharper point, the stronger arm, the more extended lunge?' Is Shakespeare hinting here that one day critics will hit upon another, more suitable candidate, identify the individual in whom the man and artist converge and are 'one'? If so, his choice of metaphor - recalling Hamlet's lunge at the arras in the closet scene - is fortunate. Could James have forgotten that the sharp point of Hamlet's weapon finds the wrong man? — James Shapiro

If [God] has made it a law in the nature of man to pursue his own happiness, He has left him free in the choice of place as well as mode, and we may safely call on the whole body of English jurists to produce the map on which nature has traced for each individual the geographical line which she forbids him to cross in pursuit of happiness. — Thomas Jefferson

It is eminently reasonable that men should seek to associate with those who share their convictions and values. It is impossible to deal or even to communicate with men whose ideas are fundamentally opposed to one's own (and one should be free not to deal with them). All proper associations are formed or joined by individual choice and on conscious, intellectual grounds (philosophical, political, professional, etc.) - not by the physiological or geographical accident of birth, and not on the ground of tradition. When men are united by ideas, i.e., by explicit principles, there is no room for favors, whims, or arbitrary power: the principles serve as an objective criterion for determining actions and for judging men, whether leaders or members. — Ayn Rand

Religion forces every individual to take responsibility. Specifically, take it away from yourself and give it to God. If we had to be accountable for every one of our actions, we'd be crippled with indecision. But with religion pointing the way, we can feel confident in our choice to picket our children's elementary school when we find out the art teacher is gay. — Stephen Colbert

When it comes to individual destiny, there is no power greater in the universe then the conviction of the human soul to make a choice. — James Dashner

The bible doesn't say Jesus had a power to command, only to recommend, which leaves each one of us with an individual freedom of choice. Maybe it's just that there are too many of us making too many bad choices for the good of the whole." He took a bite out of his apple. "Too many people and none of us wanting or able to hear the harmony. — Bryan Islip

Based upon the tournament results and the formal propositions, four simple suggestions are offered for individual choice: do not be envious of the other player's success; do not be the first to defect; reciprocate both cooperation and defection; and do not be too clever. — Robert Axelrod

Thinking is hard. Making value judgments is difficult. It places you at pure creation, because there are so many times you'll have to say, "I don't know. I just don't know." Yet still you'll have to decide. And so you'll have to choose. You'll have to make an arbitrary choice. Such a choice-a decision coming from no previous personal knowledge-is called pure creation. And the individual is aware, deeply aware, that in the making of such decisions is the Self created. — Neale Donald Walsch

Empathy isn't just something that happens to us - a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain - it's also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It's made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it's asked for, but this doesn't make our caring hollow. The act of choosing simply means we've committed ourselves to a set of behaviors greater than the sum of our individual inclinations: I will listen to his sadness, even when I'm deep in my own. To say "going through the motions" - this isn't reduction so much as acknowledgment of the effort - the labor, the motions, the dance - of getting inside another person's state of heart or mind. — Rebecca Skloot

Just as we can't fully explain what is beautiful, so we can't fully explain why we are friends with someone in a way that will make the grounds of our attraction obvious to another - and even to ourselves. Our efforts always leave something out. And it is what is always left out that we try to gesture toward when we say that it is not something ABOUT our friends that we love but our friends THEMSELVES. But the self that we love is always just one one step behind whatever we can actually articulate. And so we are faced with a choice between saying something that seems informative but is never enough of an explanation ('loyal, practical, unworldly and so on') and saying something else that seems like an explanation but is completely uninformative ('the individual, in the uniqueness and integrity of his or her individuality'). — Alexander Nehamas

If the New Marketing can be characterized by just one idea, it's this: Ideas that spread through groups of people are far more powerful than ideas delivered at an individual.
Social change, education, new-product launches, religious movements ... it doesn't matter, the story is the same. Movements are at the heart of change and growth. A movement - an idea that spreads with passion through a community and leads to change - is far more powerful than any advertisement ever could be.
As you consider what to do next, you're faced with a difficult choice. It's difficult because it represents giving up something you may be quite comfortable with, and it's difficult because it requires an all-or-nothing commitment. — Seth Godin

What you up to, Isaac? They're so egalitarian ... well ... Their society's all based on maximizing choice for the individual, which is why they're communistic. Grants the most uninhibited choice to everyone. And as far as I remember the only crime they have is depriving another garuda of choice. And then it's exacerbated or mollified depending on whether they do it with or without respect, which they absolutely love ... — China Mieville

The system loves resistance. Resistance is often creative and it feeds on creativity until the subversive becomes just another pre-packaged lifestyle on special offer. So Cease to Resist. Relax and enjoy the PandaemonAeon. Believe everything and anything. Seek not proof, but take pleasure in your choice of belief. Wipe that superior sneer of your face and try smiling (if only inwardly) at the people/institutions/beliefs that you've waged your personal war against. Wouldn't it be more fun if you didn't run around quite so hard trying to be an individual, or fighting to prove or uphold your chosen belief-system? — Phil Hine

The decision-making part of the brain of an individual who has been using crystal meth is very interesting. When Carly and Andy were in their apartment, they ran out of drugs. They sold every single thing they had except two things: a couch and a blow torch. They had to make a decision because something had to be sold to buy more drugs. A normal person would automatically think, Sell the blow torch. But Andy and Carly sat on the couch, looking at the couch and looking at the blow torch, and the choice brought intense confusion. The couch? The blow torch? I mean, we may not need the blow torch today, but what about tomorrow? If we sell the couch, we can still sit wherever we want. But the blow torch? A blow torch is a very specific item. If you're doing a project and you need a blow torch, you can't substitute something else for it. You would have to have a blow torch, right? In the end, they sold the couch. — Dina Kucera

Unfortunately, it's true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. If you're not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter. — Charles Yu

Sentimental Humanitarianism: A Dangerous Temptation Gregg argues that sentimental humanitarianism: Reduces most debates to exchanges of feelings. Common responses to disagreements are "you can't say that" or "that's hurtful" or "that offends me." But in quoting British novelist Ian McEwan, Gregg says there is nothing virtuous about being offended. Is naive of human nature. It assumes everyone is of good will. Rather, Gregg says we have to acknowledge that there are some groups of people in which rational conversation is not possible. Doesn't take free choice seriously. It claims all evil emanates from bad education and unjust structures, but this is hardly the full story. Evil is a free choice of each individual, and Gregg says it's not something that can be explained away by the fact that someone is wealthier than — Anonymous

The course of human history consists of a series of encounters between individual human beings and God in which each man and woman or child, in turn, is challenged by God to make his free choice between doing God's will and refusing to do it. — Arnold J. Toynbee

Thus, and not otherwise, the world was made. Either something or nothing must depend on individual choices. — C.S. Lewis

To work for libertarianism - to oppose the growth of government and aid the liberation of the individual - used to be an idealistic choice taken for purely idealistic reasons. Now it is an act of intelligent and almost desperate self-defense. — Robert Anton Wilson

According to Callero, "Freedom of choice and self-determination are virtuous principles, but when selfish individual interests threaten to destroy the common good, the limits of individualism are exposed."4 Unfortunately but predictably, Callero is vague when it comes to defining "the common good" - a catchphrase with many variations that has been used by murderous dictators throughout history. May we therefore say that the "common good," when pushed to extremes, results in the likes of Stalin and Hitler? — George H. Smith

There is a lot of talk about "rigged games" as of late. Big government is the most insipid of all "rigged games". There is no choice available to the public allowing it to avoid a big over-arching government. You can always chose not do business with a big corporation. Corporations that are distasteful can be avoided. A big, powerful, government bent on intrusion cannot be avoided. — A.E. Samaan

In further institutionalizing the great power of the majority, we are making the individual come to distrust himself. We are giving him a rationalization for the unconscious urging to find an authority that would resolve the burdens of free choice. We are tempting him to reinterpret the group pressures as a release, authority as freedom, and that this quest assumes a moral guise makes it only the more poignant. — William H. Whyte

...human behavior is fragile and unpredictable and often at the mercy of the situation. Every individual still, of course, has a choice as to how to behave, it's just that for many people the situation is the key determinate in that choice. — Laurence Rees

For the word "We" must never be spoken, save by one's choice and as a second thought. This word must never be placed first within man's soul, else it becomes a monster, the root of all the evils on earth, the root of man's torture by men, and of an unspeakable lie.
The word "We" is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the grey of it. It is the word by which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages. — Ayn Rand

Happiness lies neither in vice nor in virtue; but in the manner we appreciate the one and the other, and the choice we make pursuant to our individual organization. — Marquis De Sade

I claim the right to be who I want to be. Regardless of my choice, I will find those who agree and those who don't. I will gain support, and I will confront opposition, but I will stand firmly as me.
It is my choice.
It is the only real choice I have to make. — Richelle E. Goodrich

All the traditional westerns are about choice and the individual. When progress comes it's much more difficult to define the individual in that world. — Gore Verbinski

Either the State for ever, crushing individual and local life, taking over in all fields of human activity, bringing with it its wars and its domestic struggles for power, its palace revolutions which only replace one tyrant by another, and inevitably at the end of this development there is ... death!Or the destruction of States, and new life starting again in thousands of centers on the principle of the lively initiative of the individual and groups and that of free agreement.The choice lies with you! — Peter Kropotkin

With the myth of the State out of the way, the real mutuality and reciprocity of society and individual became clear. Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice - the power of change, the essential function of life. The Odonian society was conceived as a permanent revolution, and revolution begins in the thinking mind. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Advancing the notion that there can be many "feminisms" has served the conservative and liberal political interests of women seeking status and privileged class power who were among the first group to use the term "power feminists." They also were the group that began to suggest that one could be feminist and anti-abortion. This another misguided notion. Granting women the civil right to have control over our bodies is a basic feminist principle. Whether an individual female should have an abortion is purely a matter of choice. It is not anti-feminist for us to choose not to have abortions. But it is a feminist principle that women should have the right to choose. — Bell Hooks

Freedom of religion, as the Founding Fathers saw it, was not just the right to associate oneself with a certain denomination but the right to disassociate without penalty. Belief or nonbelief was a matter of individual choice - a right underwritten in the basic charter of the nation's liberties. — Norman Cousins

Becoming a genuine individual requires learning the oppositions within oneself. Those who fail or refuse to face the oppositions within have no choice but to find enemies to project upon. Enemy simply means a "not-friend;" unless a person deals with the not-friend within they require enemies around them. — Michael Meade

It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth. It is my ears which hear, and the hearing of my ears gives its song to the world. It is my mind which thinks, and the judgement of my mind is the only searchlight that can find the truth. It is my will which chooses, and the choice of my will is the only edict I must respect. — Ayn Rand

For what is the best choice, for each individual is the highest it is possible for him to achieve. — Aristotle.

Directive design gives an either/or choice, similar to a traffic sign. Interpretive design allows for personal choice, in the same way symbolism allows for individual meaning. — Maggie Macnab

Organizing among agency workers is structurally impossible, and the enforced atomization of the agency worker is rephrased as 'individual choice', 'your freedom'. — Nina Power

His argument runs like this: there is no goodness without free will. Without the ability to freely choose-or reject-the good, an individual possesses no control over his own soul, and without that control, there is not possibility of attaining grace. In the language of Christianity, a beliver cannot be saved unless the choice to follow Christ is freely made, unless the option not to follow him genuinely exists. Compelled belief is no belief at all. — Thomas C. Foster

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. — Arlie Russell Hochschild

Stop crying. Stop sitting in the dark counting out all your individual feelings about how sad and lonely you are. Wake up ( ... ) You're not the only person in this world who doesn't want to get out of bed in the morning ( ... ) You can be whoever the hell you want to be now ( ... ) So make a choice. Make a choice and stop wasting everyone's time. Stop eating your own time. Okay? — Tahereh Mafi

Over the past seventy years the various identity struggles have to some degree remediated the great wrongs that have been done to workers, people of color, Indigenous Peoples, women, gays and lesbians, and the disabled, while helping to humanize our society overall. But they have also had a shadow side in the sense that they have encouraged us to think of ourselves more as determined than as self-determining, more as victims of 'isms' (racism, sexism, capitalism, ableism) than as human beings who have the power of choice. For our own survival we must assume individual and collective responsibility for creating a new nation - one that is loved rather than feared and one that does not have to bribe and bully other nations to win support. — Grace Lee Boggs

As a liberal, I would hesitate to propose a blanket ban on any style of dress because of the implications for individual liberty and freedom of choice. — Richard Dawkins

One way we exercise political freedom is to vote for the candidate of our choice. Another way is to use our money to try to persuade other voters to make a similar choice - that is, to contribute to our candidate's campaign. If either of these freedoms is violated, the consequences are very grave not only for the individual voter and contributor, but for the society whose free political processes depend on a wide distribution of political power. — Barry Goldwater

I think vegetarianism is a crucial ethical choice for an individual and a society. — Bernhard Goetz