"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."
— Dr. Seuss

"Remember to always be yourself. Unless you suck."
— Joss Whedon

"You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first."
— Jim Morrison

"why are trying so hard to fit in, when you're born to stand out"
— Oliver James

"... I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room."
— Ray Bradbury

"Always be a first rate version of yourself and not a second rate version of someone else. "
— Judy Garland

"About all you can do in life is be who you are. Some people will love you for you. Most will love you for what you can do for them, and some won't like you at all."
— Rita Mae Brown

"Where's your will to be weird? "
— Jim Morrison

"I think the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself."
— Rita Mae Brown

"All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints."
— David Sedaris (Holidays on Ice)

"My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. "Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?" they asked me the other day. I told them this story: In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day."
— Tom Waits

"Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself."
— Harvey Fierstein

"I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals and I loathe humanity for its failure to live up to these possibilities."
— Ayn Rand

"Its hard to be a diamond in a rhinestone world."
— Dolly Parton

"I've come to believe that each of us has a personal calling that's as unique as a fingerprint - and that the best way to succeed is to discover what you love and then find a way to offer it to others in the form of service, working hard, and also allowing the energy of the universe to lead you. "
— Oprah Winfrey

"I was the walrus, but now I am John...and so my friends, you'll just have to carry on. The dream is over."
— John Lennon

"'It's so hard to express yourself.'
'I understand this.'
'I want to express myself.'
'The same is true for me.'
'I'm looking for my voice.'
'It's in your mouth.'
'I want to do something I'm not ashamed of.'
'Something you are proud of, yes?'
'Not even. I just don't want to be ashamed.'"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)

"Instead of being presented with stereotypes by age, sex, color, class, or religion, children must have the opportunity to learn that within each range, some people are loathsome and some are delightful."
— Margaret Mead

"I am an American; free born and free bred, where I acknowledge no man as my superior, except for his own worth, or as my inferior, except for his own demerit."
— Theodore Roosevelt

"I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me."
— John Lennon

"They say 'freak' when you're singled out"
— Chevelle (The Red)

"The ultimate measure of a person is not where they stand in moments of comfort and convenience, but where they stand in times of challenge and controversy."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"The man who follows the crowd will get no farther than the crowd. A man who walks alone is likely to get places no one has ever been before"
— Alan Ashley-Pitt

"Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another."
— Carl Sagan (Cosmos)

"Everyone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his soul’s possessions; to gain the esteem of others, we must only ever show our ugliest sides; this is how we keep ourselves on the common level"
— Gustave Flaubert (November)

"About all you can do in life is be who you are."
— Rita Mae Brown

"The unique must be fulfilled."
— Martha Graham

"If you are different from the rest of the flock, they bite you"
— Vincent O'Sullivan (The next room)

"Lord have mercy on a country girl - trying to make a living in a rhinestone world..."
— Dolly Parton

"To be an outlaw you must first have a base in law to reject and get out of, I never had such a base. I never had a place I could call home that meant any more than a key to a house, apartment or hotel room. … Am I alien? Alien from what exactly? Perhaps my home is my dream city, more real than my waking life precisely because it has no relation to waking life…"
— William S. Burroughs

"It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations -- past and present -- are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millenia."
— Eric Hoffer

"'I' is merely one of the world's instantaneous spasms."
— Clarice Lispector (The Passion According to G.H.)

"The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves. "
— Marcel Duchamp

"Being an American is about having the right to be who you are. Sometimes that doesn't happen. "
— Herb Ritts

"They thought that it would be a disgrace to go forth as a group. Each entered the forest at a point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path. If there is a path it is someone else's path and you are not on the adventure."
— Joseph Campbell (The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life & Work)

"But these few are the salt of the earth; without them, human life would become a stagnant pool. Not only is it they who introduce good things which did not before exist, it is they who keep the life in those which already existed."
— John Stuart Mill (On Liberty)