Individual Choice Quotes

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

When a liberal professor takes enormous intellectual liberties by openly promoting an ideological agenda to his students, the cry of academic freedom rings across the quads. But when a conservative professor is punished for publishing an article in a politically incorrect journal, there is no defense of intellectual diversity. What is billed as academic neutrality turns out to be a smoke screen for the relativistic liberal agenda.

Today's relativists could not have gotten away with their double standards in a culture that prized truth. But a gradual, sustained assault on truth has been carried out through the soft underbelly of Western culture: the arts. In film, music, and television, the themes of sensual pleasure and individual choice have drowned out the tried-and-true virtues of faith, family, self-sacrifice, duty, honor, patriotism, and fidelity in marriage. Cultural mechanics have wielded their tools to dull the public's sense of reasonable limits. In an Age of Consent, the silly and the profound are becoming indistinguishable. ~ Gary L. Bauer

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

Patriarchy creates megapatterns that affect us all
even as we forge different individual choices within them
just as do themegapatterns of nationalism or racism. ~ Gloria Steinem

In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights. After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as advocates of gay marriage insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one's autonomous choices in love, then the first requirement - the number restriction (two and only two) - is a similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of individual choice. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Having it all means different things to different people. I think it's an individual choice. Nothing is perfect. Everyone makes sacrifices. For me, it's worked out well. I have children. I have a very interesting career. But it's not for everybody. ~ Renee James

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

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

It is the responsibility, yet the individual choice, of each of us to use the light we have to dispel the work of darkness, because if we do not, the power of falsehood rises. Through our inaction it becomes stronger, and a more potent force. It can even lead to the dimming of the light of all humanity born on this planet. That is why we struggle. That is why we fight to contribute to the confirmation of what is good, to seal our compact with love within our own lives and within our world. ~ John Lewis

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

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

The transmission of SARS, Dwyer said, seems to depend much on super spreaders - and their behavior, not to mention the behavior of people around them, can be various. The mathematical ecologist's term for variousness of behavior is "heterogeneity," and Dwyer's models have shown that heterogeneity of behavior, even among forest insects, let alone among humans, can be very important in damping the spread of infectious disease.

"If you hold mean transmission rate constant," he told me, "just adding heterogeneity by itself will tend to reduce the overall infection rate." That sounds dry. What it means is that individual effort, individual discernment, individual choice can have huge effects in averting the catastrophes that might otherwise sweep through a herd. An individual gypsy moth may inherit a slightly superior ability to avoid smears of NPV as it grazes on a leaf.

An individual human may choose not to drink the palm sap, not to eat the chimpanzee, not to pen the pig beneath mango trees, not to clear the horse's windpipe with his bare hand, not to have unprotected sex with the prostitute, not to share the needle in a shooting gallery, not to cough without covering her mouth, not to board a plane while feeling ill, or not to coop his chickens along with his ducks. "Any tiny little thing that people do," Dwyer said, if it makes them different from one another, from the idealized standard of herd behavior, "is going to reduce infection rates. ~ David Quammen

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

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

First, then, State Socialism, which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by the government, regardless of individual choice. ~ Benjamin Tucker

I am a small-government person, and I greatly oppose government intrusion into everything. Still, it is essential that we distinguish between those things that are important and those things that are just intruding upon our basic privacy. Whether to participate in childhood immunizations would be an individual choice if individuals were the only ones affected, but as previously mentioned, our children are part of our larger community. None of us lives in isolation. Your decision does not affect only you - it also affects your fellow Americans. ~ Ben Carson

[L]iberals insist that children should be given the right to remain part of their particular community, but on condition that they are given a choice. But for, say, Amish children to really have a free choice of which way of life to choose, either their parents' life or that of the "English," they would have to be properly informed on all the options, educated in them, and the only way to do what would be to extract them from their embeddedness in the Amish community, in other words, to effectively render them "English." This also clearly demonstrates the limitations of the standard liberal attitude towards Muslim women wearing a veil: it is deemed acceptable if it is their free choice and not an option imposed on them by their husbands or family. However, the moment a woman wears a veil as the result of her free individual choice, the meaning of her act changes completely: it is no longer a sign of her direct substantial belongingness to the Muslim community, but an expression of her idiosyncratic individuality, of her spiritual quest and her protest against the vulgarity of the commodification of sexuality, or else a political gesture of protest against the West. A choice is always a meta-choice, a choice of the modality of choice itself: it is one thing to wear a veil because of one's immediate immersion in a tradition; it is quite another to refuse to wear a veil; and yet another to wear one not out of a sense of belonging, but as an ethico-political choice. This is why, ~ Slavoj Zizek

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

Migration - whether emigration or return - at the micro level is an individual choice, and government both at the Centre and the states have role only to facilitate the decision of the individuals. ~ Vayalar Ravi

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

Inconveniently, books are all the pages in them, not just the ones you choose to read. ~ Don Paterson

I had as much influence over Loneliness as it had over me! I can see that now. No one can help how they feel so I was stuck with Loneliness. But I had a choice. I could let Loneliness consume me for the rest of my life, give in to it and let it control me like a puppet… or I could fight back. When it would whisper in my ear and tell me to lash out at those I loved, to push them away, I'd say no. When it tried to keep me lonely I would hold it at arm's length and… it would listen. ~ Carrie Hope Fletcher

Private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information. It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights. ~ Albert Einstein

To me, it looks like an opportunity for school choice. I'd also like to see a pilot program to allow true school choice ? vouchers. ~ David Bradley

The individual is the true reality of life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called "society," or the "nation," which is only a collection of individuals. ~ Emma Goldman

Truth, purity, and unselfishness wherever these are present, there is no power below or above the sun to crush the possessor thereof. Equipped with these, one individual is able to face the whole universe in opposition. ~ Swami Vivekananda

What if believing was not about the good in the world? What if people had faith not because of what some superior being could do for them but what they could do when the light of something bigger than any one individual awakened within them--for the sake of others? If evil had been here since the dawn of time, maybe goodness was also here. Maybe, his mistake was thinking it was about him, his own future, his own soul, and not about this: the world needed the good that was in him. ~ G.P. Ching

I believe we have a choice in this world about how to tell sad stories , on the one hand , we can sugercoat it. Nothing is too messed up that can't be fixed with a Peter Gabriel song, I like this version as much as the next girl does. It's just not the truth ~ John Green

I never knew what was meant by choice of words. It was one word or none. ~ Robert Frost

Self-discovery is the process of learning about who you are as an individual, independent from your friends, family, employer, or nation. ~ Scott Berkun

The only true liberty is in the service of that which is beyond all limits, beyond all definitions, beyond all human appreciation: that which is All, and which therefore is no limited or individual thing: The All is no-thing, for if it were to be a single thing separated from all other things, it would not be All. ~ Thomas Merton

God's sovereign will is not at the whim and mercy of our person and individual responses to it. ~ R.C. Sproul

God is a complex of ideas formed by the tribe, the nation, and humanity, which awake and organize social feelings and aim to link the individual to society and to bridle the zoological individualism. ~ Maxim Gorky

Such compliments
they were thrilling but almost impossible to absorb in this quantity, at this pace. It was like she was being pelted with magnificent hail, and she wished she could save the individual stones to examine later, but they'd exist with such potency only now, in this moment. ~ Curtis Sittenfeld

This is no time to be precious about locating the exact individuals directly involved in this particular terrorist attack ... We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. ~ Ann Coulter

No matter how frustrated you may feel, there is always a way out. In every situation that arises, we choose to be powerful or powerless. It may not always feel like it, but it is a choice. And there are consequences for these choices in terms of the results we get, and the subsequent increase or decrease in our power and influence. If we choose powerlessness, it is often because we doubt there is any other option. ~ Blaine Lee Pardoe

I shouldn't precisely have chosen madness if there had been any choice, but once such a thing has taken hold of you, you can't very well get out of it. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

There is but one season of the year when salmon should be served hot at a choice repast; that is in the spring and early summer, and even then it is too satisfying, nut sufficiently delicate. The man who gives salmon during the winter, I care not what sauce he serves with it, does an injury to himself and his guests. ~ Ward McAllister

There is no such thing as no choice. There is always a choice. The only question is whether it's a bearable one. ~ David Levithan

I believe in one that all people are dreaming. This now, past and future is just a long dream, some people wake up by dieing, other by suicide everything is about a choice. But the people which are dead in our world, there aren't dead in the other they are still alive and watching us and they are smiling at us and they want we to make our choice. To think then to do it! ~ Deyth Banger

You have the choice to be here as a speck of creation or as the very source of creation. Not exploring such a phenomenal possibility is a crime. ~ Jaggi Vasudev

Political marketing...plays to people's emotions, not their thoughts. It operates on the belief that repeating a catchy phrase, even if it's untrue, will seal an idea in the mind of the unknowing or uncaring public. It assumes that citizens will always choose on the basis of their individual wants and not society's needs. It divides the country into "niche" markets and abandons the hard political work of knitting together broad consensus or national vision ~ Susan Delacourt

a real teacher never wishes to make another individual dependent on him or her -- rather, the intention is always to help an individual develop the person's own spiritual sense of taste or dhawk concerning interior events so that one can learn to distinguish truth from falsehood and so that one can learn how to trust one's essential Self (as opposed to one's surface self which is rooted in an unredeemed nafs). ~ Bill Whitehouse

For he will speak peace to his people. . . . psalm 85:8 Peace is a language. To "speak peace" is very different from speaking of peace. To speak of peace is to reason about it. But to speak peace is to impart it. The promise in this psalm is that God will make peace with us and among us. But the phrase also serves as a reminder that our words are acts. When we speak, we may stir up animosities, suspicions, jealousies, or old hurts - or we may impart peace. Peace may be "uttered" not only in gentleness of voice when we speak, but in the choice of words that reframe, redirect, or surprise us into reconsidering. Sometimes a way of describing the problem or conflict as an opportunity for invention or imagination or learning can enable those who are stuck in a point of view to see a new way. ~ Marilyn Chandler McEntyre

There's always something to suggest that you'll never be who you wanted to be. Your choice is to take it or keep on moving. ~ Phylicia Rashad

Liberalism is a really old British tradition and it has a completely different attitude towards the individual and the relationship between the individual and the state than the collectivist response of Labour, and particularly Old Labour, does. ~ Nick Clegg

To my mind by far the greatest danger in scholarship ... is not that the individual may fail to master the thought of a school but that a school may succeed in mastering the thought of the individual. ~ Geoffrey Sampson

Individual humans are not super, but the organism of which we are all tiny cellular parts is most certainly that. The life-form that's so big we forget it's there, that turns minerals on its planet into tools to touch the infinite black gap between stars or probe the obliterating pressures at the bottom of the oceans. We are already part of a superbeing, a monster, a god, a living process that is so all encompassing that it is to an individual life what water is to a fish. We are cells in the body of a three-billion-year-old life-form whose roots are in the Precambrian oceans and whose genetic wiring extends through the living structures of everything on the planet, connecting everything that has ever lived in one immense nervous system. ~ Grant Morrison

People should make distinctions between the office of the presidency and the person who occupies it. You can respect the office even as you lose respect for the individual. ~ David Greenberg

Maybe that's all life was, this impossibly complicated helix of choice and accident, things you could control and couldn't. And when the day was done, the only measure of success was how happy you were, how much you loved and were loved. ~ Lisa Unger

Moving in space, the atoms originally were individual units, but inevitable they began to collide with each other, and in cases where their shapes were such as to permit them to interlock, they began to form clusters. Water, air, fire, and earth, these are simply different clusters of the changeless atoms. ~ Democritus

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it's a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. ~ Zadie Smith

It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations
past and present
are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millenia. ~ Eric Hoffer

We don't go to Sabbath meetings to be entertained or even solely
to be instructed. We go to worship the Lord. It is an individual
responsibility, and regardless of what is said from the pulpit, if one
wishes to worship the Lord in spirit and truth, he may do so by
attending his meetings, partaking of the sacrament, and
contemplating the beauties of the gospel If the service is a
failure to you, you have failed. No one can worship for you. You
must do your own waiting upon the Lord. ~ Spencer W. Kimball

There are things you do sometimes, actions that you take by obeying sudden impulses, without stopping for even a fraction of a second to think, and then you spend the rest of your life either lamenting it or thanking yourself for it. They are rare, unique, and perfect moments. ~ Irene Gonzalez Frei

I had no choice but to understand that people can demean and hit you and in their better moments love you, at once be a mess themselves and carry a deep pride in your strange togetherness. They suffered from weakness of character, yes-just like every other person, in every other income bracket. What really put shame on us wasn't our moral deficit. It was our money deficit. ~ Sarah Smarsh

Our choices at all levels-individual, community, corporate and government-affect nature. And they affect us. ~ David Suzuki

Chant to him: "An individual thinks for himself." Then roll that around in his head till it means: "If I didn't think of it, it has no bearing on my life. ~ Geoffrey Wood

For it is a choice, I think, to close the heart, just as it is a choice to open it. It is a choice to look at what distresses you, and a choice to shut your eyes. It is a choice to hold tight your pain, or else let it slip your grasp, set it free to make its mark upon the world. ~ Beth Underdown

You may not need a teacher or you may be drawn to one - everything is individual. But the main thing you need to do is meditate and learn to stop your thoughts and enter into the ocean of infinite awareness. You will be directed from there. ~ Frederick Lenz

We don't accidentally drift into holiness; rather we mature gradually and purposefully, one choice at a time. ~ C.J. Mahaney

If I had a choice, I would still choose to remain blind ... for when I die, the first face I will ever see will be the face of my blessed Saviour. ~ Fanny Crosby

It is not in our choice to spread the gospel or not. It is our death if we do not. ~ Peter Forsyth

I may be prejudiced, but I believe that jazz music has the strongest healing potential, and it's not just because I play it and love it so much. I feel that it's the improvisation in jazz that makes it so strong as a healing tool, what each individual gives to a tune from their heart and their soul when they take a solo. It's all spontaneous, and it's all love, and from the heart. ~ Horace Silver