Loss of Individuality Quotes

Liberalism is the transformation of mankind into cattle.

There is no telling to what extremes of cruelty and ruthlessness a man will go when he is freed from the fears, hesitations, doubts and the vague stirrings of decency that go with individual judgement. When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom- freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse. Herein undoubtedly lies part of the attractiveness of a mass movement

One aspect of modern life which has gone far to stifle men is the rapid growth of tremendous corporations ... The disappearance of free enterprise has led to a submergence of the individual in the impersonal corporation.

I think we are slowly killing liberty, creativity, intelligent thinking; it's as if we are being led into a world that is like a huge shopping centre, with a sort of anaesthesia about everything except the choice of goods in front of us.

Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.

Seeing God without seeing the Self, one sees only mental image. Only he who has seen Himself has seen God, since he has lost individuality, and now sees nothing but God.

To grow old is to grow common. Old age equalizes -- we are aware that what is happening to us has happened to untold numbers from the beginning of time. When we are young we act as if we were the first young people in the world.

Our people made that choice, the choice to go to Sameness. Before my time, before the previous time, back and back and back. We relinquished color when we relinquished sunshine and did away with difference. We gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others.

People are so codified - it's sad.

The first effect of adjusting to other people is that one becomes boring.

We're all getting lashed to the great wheel of uniformity.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

Sometimes you do get caught up in the midst of becoming... a product, a brand, and not having a say in any of that.

She had for so many years been trying to be like other people, that she was now like nothing in heaven or earth.

Similar (of course, far from identical) irritations in similar conditions call out similar reflexes; the more powerful the irritation, the sooner it overcomes personal peculiarities. To a tickle, people react differently, but to a red-hot iron, alike. As a steam-hammer converts a sphere and a cube alike into sheet metal, so under the blow of too great and inexorable events resistances are smashed and the boundaries of "individuality" lost.

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother

When a man can take a poll and tell what everybody is thinking, that means nobody is really thinking anymore.

I actually keep having this one recurring dream where I'm a little number standing in a line of other numbers that look identical to me. Then there are more and more of these numbers that follow me, again and again and again. It's more of a nightmare.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that schools are just factories for turning out robots, that's all. They get you when your small and vulnerable and they take all the human parts away, bit by bit, until you're just a wind-up toy. Turn the key and set it running. And the toy goes to university, gets a job, settles down with someone nice.

The revulsion from an unwanted self, and the impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off and lose it, produce both a readiness to sacrifice the self and a willingness to dissolve it by losing one's individual distinctness in a compact collective whole.

I settle into their pace. The uniform pounding of feet in my ears and the homogeneity of the people around me makes me believe that I could choose this. I could be subsumed into Abnegation’s hive mind, projecting always outward.

When people get placed upon a pedestal - when they start chasing after that person on the pedestal - they become mannequin-like.

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say "I think," "I am," but quotes some saint or sage.

We see, then, that the disappearance of the conscious personality, the predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning by means of suggestion and contagion of feelings and ideas in an identical direction, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the individual forming part of a crowd. He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will.