{"quotes":[{"text":"So your theory would seem to be that lying to yourself is no lie at all because you haven’t deceived any third party. And if you then convince yourself of those lies, you’ll believe them enough to repeat them to other with the genuine conviction that they’re true.” 'Something like that,” I conceded uneasily.","author":"Zack Love","tags":["honesty","individuals","lies","life","philosophy","reality","truths"],"id":18085,"author_id":"Zack+Love"},{"text":"Laws made by common consent must not be trampled on by individuals.","author":"George Washington","tags":["laws","consent","individuals "],"id":28172,"author_id":"George+Washington"},{"text":"There is history the way Tolstoy imagined it, as a great, slow-moving weather system in which even tsars and generals are just leaves before the storm. And there is history the way Hollywood imagines it, as a single story line in which the right move by the tsar or the wrong move by the general changes everything. Most of us, deep down, are probably Hollywood people. We like to invent “what if” scenarios--what if x had never happened, what if y had happened instead?--because we like to believe that individual decisions make a difference: that, if not for x, or if only there had been y, history might have plunged forever down a completely different path. Since we are agents, we have an interest in the efficacy of agency.","author":"Louis Menand","tags":["agents","decisions","fate","history","individuals","predestination","tolstoy"],"id":30734,"author_id":"Louis+Menand"},{"text":"I kept remembering something Michael Fertik had said to me at the Village Pub in Woodside. 'The biggest lie,' he said, 'is 'The Internet is about you.' We like to think of ourselves as people who have choice and taste and personalized content. But the Internet isn't about us. It's about the companies that dominate the data flows of the Internet.","author":"Jon Ronson","tags":["data","individuals","internet"],"id":49361,"author_id":"Jon+Ronson"},{"text":"For some individuals, this life will be the only bit of heaven they will ever experience while for some it will be the only bit of hell they will ever experience...","author":"Paddick Van Zyl Pr","tags":["experience","god","heaven","hell","individuals","life","salvation"],"id":50598,"author_id":"Paddick+Van+Zyl+Pr"},{"text":"Love is dangerous because it makes you an individual. And the state and the church . . . They don’t want individuals, not at all. They don’t want human beings, they want sheep. They want people who only look like human beings but whose souls have been crushed so utterly, damaged so deeply, that it seems almost irreparable.","author":"Osho","tags":["church","human-beings","individuals","love","sheep","soul","state"],"id":59181,"author_id":"Osho"},{"text":"Good boundaries, created by the use of good intimacy skills, keep a committed or intimate relationship lightly balanced between the needs of the individual and the needs of the relationship.","author":"Anne Katherine","tags":["balance","couples","individuals","intimacy","relationships"],"id":65948,"author_id":"Anne+Katherine"},{"text":"Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.","author":"John Rawls","tags":["freedom","individuals","justice","liberalism","philosophy","social-institutions","society","theory","truth"],"id":68532,"author_id":"John+Rawls"},{"text":"... Unfools of unbeing ... Means quite clearly people who are too stereotyped to be eccentric – people who are too dead spiritually to exist at all and who call alive individual fools.","author":"Norman Friedman","tags":["individuals","poetry","spirituality","stereotypes"],"id":68625,"author_id":"Norman+Friedman"},{"text":"We live individual lives with the consciousness of death and awareness of the past. But the most important part of that sentence is the individual part. Let yourself be humbled by the experiences people have been having for thousands of years. And speak of it.","author":"Michael Winter","tags":["individuals","life-experience"],"id":79780,"author_id":"Michael+Winter"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":63,"pages":7,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}