A Quote by Huston Smith

The Chinese began with the assumption that the group is the fundamental unit of reality. Individuals? Sure, we can factor them out from their groups, but let us not think that they as individuals have any viability apart from their group.
I believed in looking at people as individuals, not in groups. I hated groups; still do. And I saw particularly the university, the university artists really acted as a group. The others didn't so much, but the university people took advantage of that and behaved like a group, rather than as individuals. They had a lot of power that way.
When everybody in a group is susceptible to similar biases, groups are inferior to individuals, because groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.
Competing is intense among humans, and within a group, selfish individuals always win. But in contests between groups, groups of altruists always beat groups of selfish individuals.
Formation of a new race takes place when, over several generations, individuals in one group reproduce more frequently among themselves than they do with individuals in other groups.
We can distinguish three groups of scientific men. In the first and very small group we have the men who discover fundamental relations. Among these are van't Hoff, Arrhenius and Nernst. In the second group we have the men who do not make the great discovery but who see the importance and bearing of it, and who preach the gospel to the heathen. Ostwald stands absolutely at the head of this group. The last group contains the rest of us, the men who have to have things explained to us.
Any group, any group that can't work with all other groups, if they are genuinely interested in solving the problems of the Negro collectively why, I don't think that that group is really sincerely motivated toward reaching a solution.
Any group or "collective," large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members. In a free society, the "rights" of any group are derived from the rights of its members through their voluntary individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking... A group, as such, has no rights.
All initiation of force is a violation of someone else's rights, whether initiated by an individual or the state, for the benefit of an individual or group of individuals, even if it's supposed to be for the benefit of another individual or group of individuals.
People are wonderful. I love individuals. I hate groups of people. I hate a group of people with a 'common purpose'. 'Cause pretty soon they have little hats. And armbands. And fight songs. And a list of people they're going to visit at 3am. So, I dislike and despise groups of people but I love individuals. Every person you look at; you can see the universe in their eyes, if you're really looking.
Any group or "collective", large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members.
It seems that the increased number of scientific workers, their being split up into groups whose studies are limited to a small subject, and over-specialization have brought about a shrinking of intelligence. There is no doubt that the quality of any human group decreases when the number of the individuals composing this group increases beyond certain limits... The best way to increase the intelligence of scientists would be to decrease their number.
Diverse groups of problem solvers outperformed the groups of the best individuals at solving complex problems. The reason: the diverse groups got stuck less often than the smart individuals, who tended to think similarly.
The life of states cannot, any more than the life of individuals, be conditioned by the force and the will of a unit, however powerful, but by the consensus of a group, which must one day include all states.
Guerrilla marketing aims its message at individuals or, if it must be a group, the smaller the group, the better.
I think better of our behaviour as individuals than I do when we see ourselves as members of a group. It's when people start forming groups that we have to watch our backs.
No matter how you care to define it, I do not identify with the local group. Planet, species, race, nation, state, religion, party, union, club, association, neighborhood improvement committee; I have no interest in any of it. I love and treasure individuals as I meet them, I loathe and despise the groups they identify with and belong to.
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