A Quote by David Foster Wallace

But the young educated adults of the 90s -- who were, of course, the children of the same impassioned infidelities and divorces Mr. Updike wrote about so beautifully -- got to watch all this brave new individualism and self-expression and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation. Today's sub-40s have different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself.

David Foster Wallace

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About Adults American Among Anomie Beautifully Brave Children Course Deteriorate Different Dying Educated Expression Freedom Generation Got Having Horrors Impassioned Individualism Indulgence Loneliness Loved Me More New Once Prominent Prospect Same Self Self-Expression Sexual Solipsism Something Than Today Watch Were Which Without Wrote Young Yourself

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David Foster Wallace
American - Writer
February 21, 1962 - December 12, 2008

The idea of absolute freedom is fiction. It's based on the idea of an independent self. But in fact, there's no such thing. There's no self without other people. There's no self without sunlight. There's no self without dew. And water. And bees to pollinate the food that we eat...So the idea of behaving in a way that doesn't acknowledge those reciprocal relationships is not really freedom, it's indulgence.

Peter Coyote

Self-indulgence takes many forms. A man may be self-indulgent in speech, in touch, in sight. From self-indulgence a man comes to idle speech and worldly talk, to buffoonery and cracking indecent jokes. There is self-indulgence in touching without necessity, making mocking signs with the hands, pushing for a place, snatching up something for oneself, approaching someone else shamelessly. All these things come from not having the fear of God in the soul and from these a man comes little by little to perfect contempt.

Dorotheus of Gaza

The new concept of the child as equal and the new integration of children into adult life has helped bring about a gradual but certain erosion of these boundaries that once separated the world of children from the word of adults, boundaries that allowed adults to treat children differently than they treated other adults because they understood that children are different.

Marie Winn

The idea of the self interests me a great deal. What is the self? And finding yourself, and which self? In a way, we're more than one self, but you somehow try to get to a rock bottom self.

Malcolm Morley

Today's children are living a childhood of firsts. They are the first daycare generation; the first truly multicultural generation; the first generation to grow up in the electronic bubble, the environment defined by computers and new forms of television; the first post-sexual revolution generation; the first generation for which nature is more abstraction than reality; the first generation to grow up in new kinds of dispersed, deconcentrated cities, not quite urban, rural, or suburban.

Richard Louv

I like people who are as unlike me as possible, which is not an expression of self disgust or self hatred, but it's just that you know you obviously particularly admire things that you recognize yourself as not having.

Stephen Fry

In our age, self-indulgence and self-destruction, rather than self-sacrifice, are the foundations for new heroic myths.

Dean Koontz

You have to set your own boundaries. We all do. You have to self-check. At the same time, the transparency is liberating. It is so much easier than screening every little thing you do and say. There's got to be some fluidity to self-expression without constantly editing things. The older I get, the more confident I feel in that. The filters are just flung away... lets face it, filters interrupt the flow of sincerity. If you're embarrassed about something you've done, then just say it.

Shania Twain

I hated prog rock; to me, it was the ultimate expression of a bloated sense of self-importance and mindless self-indulgence.

Eric Carmen

From the 5th grade through the 4th year of college, our young people are being indoctrinated with a Marxist philosophy and I am fearful of the harvest. The younger generation is further to the left than most adults realize. The old concepts of our Founding Fathers are scoffed and jeered at by young moderns whose goals appear to be the destruction of integrity and virtue, and the glorification of pleasure, thrills, and self-indulgence.

Ezra Taft Benson

Makeup is no different than clothes and accessories - it's embellishments for your face. And it also gives you creative freedom. You get to have that moment in front the mirror every morning and give yourself self-love. You're making yourself up beautiful, which is essentially self-love.

Michelle Phan

Individualism is the self-affirmation of the individual self as individual self without regard to its participation in its world. As such it is the opposite of collectivism, the self affirmation of the self as part of a larger whole without regard to its character as an individual self.

Paul Tillich

'Rugged individualism' has meant all the 'individualism' for the masters, while the people are regimented into a slave caste to serve a handful of self-seeking 'supermen.' America is perhaps the best representative of this kind of individualism, in whose name political tyranny and social oppression are defended and held up as virtues; while every aspiration and attempt of man to gain freedom and social opportunity to live is denounced as 'un-American' and evil in the name of that same individuality.

Emma Goldman

Freedom is not an abstaction, nor is a little of it enough. A little more is not enough either. Having less, being less, empoverished in freedom and rights, women then invariably have less self-respect: less self-respect than any human being needs to live a brave and honest life.

Andrea Dworkin

Scholars, who pride themselves on speaking their minds, often engage in a form of self-censorship which is called "realism." To be "realistic" in dealing with a problem is to work only among the alternatives which the most powerful in society put forth. It is as if we are all confined to a, b, c, or d in the multiple choice test, when we know there is another possible answer. American society, although it has more freedom of expression than most societies in the world, thus sets limits beyond which respectable people are not supposed to think or speak.

Howard Zinn

My father grew up in an era when to be an American - a white American, at least - was to be yourself. In some respects, his generation was more ignorant, complacent, self-centered and parochial than mine.

William T. Vollmann

A Quote by David Foster Wallace

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