Quotes about Individual Superiority

Soren Kierkegaard

Faith is precisely the paradox that the single individual as the single individual is higher than the universal, is justified before it, not as inferior to it but superior - yet in such a way, please note, that it is the single individual who, after being subordinate as the single individual to the universal, now by means of the universal becomes the single individual who as the single individual is superior, that the single individual as the single individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute.

Aristotle

But it is not at all certain that this superiority of the many over the sound few is possible in the case of every people and every large number. There are some whom it would be impossible: otherwise the theory would apply to wild animals- and yet some men are hardly any better than wild animals.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

There has never been a poet or orator who thought another better than himself.

Don Marquis

It would be a colorless world if each individual did not secretly believe himself superior to almost everyone else.

Samuel Johnson

Every man is prompted by the love of himself to imagine that he possesses some qualities superior, either in kind or degree, to those which he sees allotted to the rest of the world.

Cal Thomas

Government has a legitimate function, but the private sector has one too, and it is superior. In other words, people are better than institutions.

Winston Churchill

Our intention is, whatever happens, to fight on to the end in this Island and, provided we can get the help for which we ask, we hope to run them very close in the air battles in view of individual superiority.... In no conceivable circumstances will we consent to surrender. If members of the present administration were finished and others came in to parley amid the ruins, you must not be blind to the fact that the sole remaining bargaining counter with Germany would be the fleet, and if this country was left by the United States to its fate no one would have the right to blame those responsible if they made the best terms they could for the surviving inhabitants. Excuse me, Mr. President, putting this nightmare bluntly. Evidently I could not answer for my successors who in utter despair and helplessness might well have to accommodate themselves to the German will. However, there is happily no need at present to dwell upon such ideas.

Things were looking bleak for the British & they were dependent on material help from the U.S. to give them a chance. The British navy was one of the largest and most powerful in the world & this cable was a veiled threat that if U.S. military aid did not come, England could not defend the country in the air, Churchill might be kicked out of office & his successors surrender to Germany turning over the British fleet to Hitler giving Germany control of the seas & with their ally Japan a naval force stronger than America’s. Anglophiles would not describe it as a threat, but merely a statement of the reality of the time. Roosevelt’s Ambassador to Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy, a Nazi sympathizer & some American military officers were opposed to aid to Britain seeing it as a lost cause. Roosevelt, however, acting on his own marvelous instinct, his advice from Harry Hopkins, and his back-channel contacts in England, decided that if armed Britain could hold out. He turned out to be right.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I believe it is the conviction of the purest men, that the net amount of man and man does not much vary. Each is incomparably superior to his companion in some faculty. His want of skill in other directions, has added to his fitness for his own work.

Individual Superiority Quotes