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Balancing the common good with the freedom and liberty to exercise that individuality has been and remains a challenge for those committed to democracy while understanding that the polis ensures our participation and therefore our citizenship.

The freedom to be an individual is the essence of America.

In our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up or else all go down as one people.

Individualism is rather like innocence; there must be something unconscious about it.

Every man, when he comes to be sensible of his natural rights, and to feel his own importance, will consider himself as fully equal to any other person whatever.

To all general purposes we have uniformly been one people, each individual citizen everywhere enjoying the same national rights, privileges, and protection.

If, in the name of liberty, we allow individuals to act in a way that damages the wellbeing of the whole, it will inevitably mean the breakdown of mutuality, thereby changing the very nature of our society.

I'm totally committed to the cause of individuality. That's the only thing I stand by: independence.

The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.