50 Individualism Quotes About How You Are Unique and Self-Reliant

By Stephanie Kirby | Published July 31, 2023

Take a look at these individualism quotes to see if this philosophy describes you.

Individualism is the belief and practice of being independent and self-reliant.

In other words, it is the belief that you are unique, have your own personality, and do not need to rely on the government or others but can rely on yourself.

Here are some traits of individualism:

You dress and act as you see fit, not what others expect of you.
You may not be a leader, but you are certainly not a follower.
You believe that the government should stay out of your personal life.
You are unique, and your career path may be unique also.
You believe in personal rights and freedom.
You believe that success is earned, not given.

Take a look at these individualism quotes and see if you can relate to them.

Top Individualism Quotes

Here are a few of the top quick quotes about individualism.

1. “I appreciate individualism.” — Freema Agyeman

2. “Never dull your shine for somebody else.” — Tyra Banks

3. “You change the world by being yourself.” — Yoko Ono

4. “You were born to stand out. Stop trying to fit in.” — Roy T. Bennet

5. “In American history, it’s about hard work and self-reliance.” — Ryan Zinke

6. “To shine your brightest light is to be who you truly are.” — Roy T. Bennett

7. “Individualism and mobility are at the core of American identity.” — Deborah Tall

8. “Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.” — Oscar Wilde

9. “In a society that tries to standardize thinking, individuality is not highly prized.” — Alex Gray

10. “If a man is not faithful to his own individuality, he cannot be loyal to anything.” — Claude McKay

Individualism Quotes about Personal Freedom

Personal freedom plays an essential role in individuality.

11. “It is the duty of every man to free himself.” — Bangambiki Habyarimana

12. “Freedom comes from strength and self-reliance.” — Lisa Murkowski

13. “The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.” — Saul Alinsky

14. “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” — Ronald Reagan

15. “No society can possibly be built on a denial of individual freedom.” — Mahatma Gandhi

16. “As precious as life itself is our heritage of individual freedom, for man’s free agency is a God-given gift.” — David O. McKay

17. “The more laws that governments pass, the less individual freedom there is. Any student of history will tell you that.” — Bill O’Reilly

18. “Freedom is our most precious commodity, and if we are not eternally vigilant, government will take it all away. Individual freedom demands individual responsibility.” — Lyn Nofziger

19. “The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background.” — George Orwell

20. “The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that’s why it’s so essential to preserving individual freedom.” — Milton Friedman

Individualism Quotes About Being Yourself

Being yourself in a world that wants you to be like everyone else and go along with the masses is powerful.

21. “Don’t you ever let a soul in the world tell you that you can’t be exactly who you are.” — Lady Gaga

22. “Can you remember who you were before the world told you who you should be?” — Charles Bukowski

23. “Never be bullied into silence… Accept no one’s definition of your life, but define yourself.” — Harvey Fierstein

24. “When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everyone will respect you.” — Lao Tzu

25. “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

26. “The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I’m against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.” — Robert Frost

27. “One of the things I admire most about millennials is they celebrate individualism, and their singularity is encouraged. To be different is to be cool as opposed to weird.” — Sutton Foster

Opposing Individualism Quotes

Not everyone agrees with the beliefs of those who support individualism.

28. “Radical individualism can be very sad.” — Blase J. Cupich

29. “I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.” — Christopher Hitchens

30. “But rugged individualism didn’t defeat the British; it didn’t get us to the moon, build our nation’s highways, or map the human genome. We did that together.” — Cory Booker

31. “I think Americans generally are not used to working very hard, in terms of working for the collective. I think in our country we have taken individualism to its farthest reaches, possibly.” — Alice Walker

32. “I don’t believe in that kind of American John Wayne individualism where people pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Someone changed your diapers; and if that’s the case, you ain’t self-made.” — Michael Eric Dyson

Self-Reliance and Individualism Quotes

The ability to be self-reliant can play an important role in maintaining individualism.

33. “My view is that we need to engender the values of hard work and independence and self-reliance.” — Pierre Poilievre

34. “We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance, and old-fashioned gumption. We really do.” — Robert M. Pirsig

35. “People who truly understand what is meant by self-reliance know they must live their lives by ethics rather than rules.” — Wayne Dyer

36. “I think self-reliance and self-responsibility and self-accountability will help you as a parent, a teacher, as a citizen as a friend.” — Henry Rollins

37. “Self-reliance—that’s a dirty word to Democrats. They want people to believe that self-reliance means you don’t do anything with anybody. They don’t want it thought of as accepting responsibility for one’s life.” — Rush Limbaugh

Individualism Quotes About Protecting It

Many worry that society is working to eliminate individualism, as spoken to in the following quotes.

38. “Individualism is rather like innocence; there must be something unconscious about it.” — Louis Kronenberger

39. “An individualist is a man who recognizes the inalienable rights of man—his own and those of others.” — Ayn Rand

40. “The function of society is to cultivate the individual. It is not the function of the individual to support society.” — Joseph Campbell

41. “We are not on the way to greater individualism, but are becoming an increasingly manipulated mass civilization.” — Erich Fromm

42. “Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.” — Carl Jung

43. “The four cornerstones of character on which the structure of this nation was built are: Initiative, Imagination, Individuality and Independence.” — Eddie Rickenbacker

44. “Individualism regards man—every man—as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being.” — Ayn Rand

Additional Quotes About Individualism

Here are a few last thoughts and quotes about the topic.

45. “Everything one tries to do for the common good ends in failure.” — Albert Camus

46. “Technologies tend to undermine community and encourage individualism.” — Henry Mintzberg

47. “Standardization of our educational systems [which includes testing] is apt to steam out individualism and defeat the very ends of education by leveling the product down rather than up.” — Harvey Cushing

48.“Individualism, the love of enterprise, and the pride in personal freedom have been deemed by Americans not only as the choicest but their peculiar and exclusive possessions.” — James Bryce

49. “I’m a daughter of the middle class with a strong sense of social mobility and individualism, like the waves of immigrants, like my Spanish grandparents, who made Argentina.” — Cristina Kirchner

50. “There’s something unique about the United States, a sense of individual rights and freedoms, and a sense of social and civic responsibility that we contributed to so much of the world.” — George Hickenlooper