What strikes many twin researchers now is not how much identical twins are alike, but rather how different they are, given the same genetic makeup....Multiples don’t walk around in lockstep, talking in unison, thinking identical thoughts. The bond for normal twins, whether they are identical or fraternal, is based on how they, as individuals who are keenly aware of the differences between them, learn to relate to one another.
—Pamela Patrick Novotny (20th century)
The procedure of the novel is to individualize. As with other art forms, what it has to say that is of collective value is said by inference from individual concrete things. History, on the other hand, proceeds by generalization. It treats people as groups; and when individuals appear they appear as catalysts of large collective actions or as representatives of groups, their significance being that of the group forces, the collection, the sum. This is a difference of convention, and on the conventions of an art depends its special expressiveness.
—Dorothy Van Ghent (b. 1907)
[Government’s] true strength consists in leaving individuals and states as much as possible to themselves—in making itself felt, not in its power, but in its beneficence, not in its control, but in its protection, not in binding the states more closely to the center, but leaving each to move unobstructed in its proper orbit.
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)