individual insignificance Quotes

The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.

The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual.

I couldn’t be with people and I didn’t want to be alone. Suddenly my perspective whooshed and I was far out in space, watching the world. I could see millions and millions of people, all slotted into their lives; then I could see me—I’d lost my place in the universe. It had closed up and there was nowhere for me to be. I was more lost than I had known it was possible for any human being to be.

Remember that the revolution is what is important, and each one of us, alone, is worth nothing.

This is the idea that has made me...an anonymous figure in America...If you have children here tonight...they are NOT special.

Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species.

Little things seem nothing, but they give peace, like those meadow flowers which individually seem odorless but all together perfume the air.

The tallest and the smallest among us are so alike diminutive and pitifully base, it is a meanness to calculate the difference.

Most individuals have always thought themselves not big enough or significant enough to have an effect on the whole planet, a notion which conversely made them think they could afford big arrogance and big greed over its resources.

Just as a drop of water in the ocean cannot avail much; but if a great river runneth into it, that maketh a great commotion.

When people feel their insignificance as individual persons, they also suffer an undermining of their sense of human responsibility.

Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.

I don't want people to think he [Eldridge Cleaver] is so important - our party is important because our party works for the people and no individual is important in our party, including myself.

How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history - greater than the fall of empires - I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.

Dictatorship, by whatever name, is founded on the doctrine that the individual amounts to nothing; that the State is the only one that counts; and that men and women and children were put on earth solely for the purpose of serving the state.

No individual rain drop ever considers itself responsible for the flood.

Like the effect of advertising upon the customer, the methods of political propaganda tend to increase the feeling of insignificance of the individual voter.

The world is shrinking as we see more and more of it in the media, and the more we see of the world, the smaller we are, the more aware we are of how insignificant any one of us is.

No man is much regarded by the rest of the world. He that considers how little he dwells upon the condition of others, will learn how little the attention of others is attracted by himself. While we see multitudes passing before us, of whom perhaps not one appears to deserve our notice or excites our sympathy, we should remember, that we likewise are lost in the same throng, that the eye which happens to glance upon us is turned in a moment on him that follows us, and that the utmost which we can reasonably hope or fear is to fill a vacant hour with prattle, and be forgotten.

An Individual, whatever species it might be, is nothing in the Universe. A hundred, a thousand individuals are still nothing. The species are the only creatures of Nature, perpetual creatures, as old and as permanent as it. In order to judge it better, we no longer consider the species as a collection or as a series of similar individuals, but as a whole independent of number, independent of time, a whole always living, always the same, a whole which has been counted as one in the works of creation, and which, as a consequence, makes only a unity in Nature.

It isn't myself that's important in this transaction apparently; the individual doesn't count much in the situation...all of us are more or less pawns. We're moved about like chessmen by circumstances over which we have no control.

It is no loss to mankind when one writer decides to call it a day. When a tree falls in the forest, who cares but the monkeys?

England still will be here without you.

It did not matter, after all. He was only one man. One man's fate is not important. "If it is not, what is?" He could not endure those remembered words.

It is of great advantage that man should know his station, and not imagine that the whole universe exists only for him.