Conformity Quotes

Insecurity of the spirit demands completeness elsewhere.

The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, monomedicine. The belief that there is only one right way to live, only one right way to regulate religious, political, sexual, medical affairs is the root cause of the greatest threat to man: members of his own species, bent on ensuring his salvation, security, and sanity.

Thomas Szasz

They need a social mechanism to make us require conformity of one other, and the best way to do that is to provide a mechanism to make us punish our own deviants.

Charles Stross

Ought one to surrender to authority even if one believed that that authority was wrong? If the answer was yes, then I knew that I would always be wrong, because I could never do it. Then how could one live in a world in which one's mind and perceptions meant nothing and authority and tradition meant everything? There were no answers.

Richard Wright

College: two hundred people reading the same book. An obvious mistake. Two hundred people can read two hundred books.

John Cage

So you're a little weird? Work it! A little different? OWN it! Better to be a nerd than one of the herd!

Mandy Hale

We are the anarchists your parents warned you about.

Suzy Kassem

All the heroes of tomorrow are the heretics of today.

E.Y. Harburg

I do not see the point in dressing and acting and speaking in a way that makes you feel more comfortable and me feel less comfortable.

Dan Pearce

Think about the word mould for a moment. A mould is a device into which one crams and smashes something until it becomes the shape that they desire. Don't spend your life letting other people destroy you while they try and force you into their moulds.

Dan Pearce

Realism arises from the maturity of the minds, while Idealism arises from their conformity.

M.F. Moonzajer

If a man does not keep pace with hiscompanions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Lethim step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple-tree oran oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer?

Henry David Thoreau

Lord, please protect me from Your people.

Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

The uncertainties in life are so uncertain for us to determine the kind of woe we shall be entangled in in the next future. When you stay dormant, your life is at risk; when you dare to take a step, you take a step to take a risk. We have a choice. Yes! a choice to choose to dare to get to our real reasons on earth or to choose to live in mediocrity and conformity, but, we ought to note that, it is riskier to risk nothing when the life we live is always at risk

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

The thing I've never understood about dancing till now is that it only looks stupid when you're on the outside, watching other people do it. When you're part of the crowd, moving along with everyone else, I can't imagine anything else being quite as much fun.

Tom Ryan

National Review's premise was that conformity was especially egregious among the intellectuals, that herd of independent minds.

George F. Will

Let's make our own way,' says the Mother, 'and not in this boat.

Lorrie Moore

Disrobe both conformity and rebellion to find true independence.

Khang Kijarro Nguyen

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.... It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Soon after Justine Sacco's shaming, I was talking with a friend, a journalist, who told me he had so many jokes, little observations, potentially risqué thoughts, that he wouldn't dare to post online anymore.'I suddenly feel with social media like I'm tiptoeing around an unpredictable, angry, unbalanced parent who might strike out at any moment,' he said. 'It's horrible.'He didn't want me to name him, he said, in case it sparked something off.We see ourselves as nonconformist, but I think all of this is creating a more conformist, conservative age.'Look!' we're saying. 'WE'RE normal! THIS is the average!'We are defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside of it.

Jon Ronson

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

Henry David Thoreau

The press, the media, the internet—they'll make the noise, make the screaming, the screaming all the time, and the truth and my voice will be lost. The blaming and the noise, human things, they'll make it about human things, not the truth. How can anyone live with it? How can anyone live with so much screaming in their lives, all the time?

Claire North

The marriage of reason and nightmare that dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century – sex and paranoia…In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way.

J.G. Ballard

None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. Ah me! no man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding the God who seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret; they love to be blind in public. They think society is wiser than their soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Most people do not have a problem with you thinking for yourself, as long as your conclusions are the same as or at least compatible with their beliefs.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I expected, as I approached the corporate world, to enter a brisk, logical, nonsense-free zone, almost like the military - or a disciplined, up-to-date military anyway - in its focus on concrete results. How else would companies survive fierce competition? But what I encountered was a culture riven with assumptions unrelated to those that underlie the fact- and logic-based worlds of, say science and journalism - a culture addicted to untested habits, paralyzed by conformity, and shot through with magical thinking.

Barbara Ehrenreich

On Earth, Liz was constantly occupied with studying and finding a college and a career and all those other things that the adults in her life deemed terribly important. Since she had died, everything she was doing on Earth had seemed entirely meaningless. From Liz's point of view, the question of what her life would be was now definitively answered. The story of her life is short and pointless: There once was a girl who got hit by a car and died. The end.

Gabrielle Zevin

It’s true, though, others won’t understand me. I know that. I’m still an alien in the American Christian subculture.Each evening I retreat from it, and I go straight to the Gospels.It's not out of duty that I read about Jesus; it's a respite.

Brant Hansen

No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Most people say that Shakespeare rocked merely because most people say that Shakespeare rocked.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I am neither for conformity nor non-conformity. I am for individuality. If one's individuality is in effect non-conformity, then so be it. But basically, one's individuality consists of conformity--to one's self.

Paul Krassner

I'd trapped myself in a script.... But to be scripted at all is to be prepackaged, programmed, pinned to a page. Only the unwritten can truly live a life. So who I was, what I was, had to be unwritten.

David James Duncan

It is a brave thing to have courage to be an individual; it is also, perhaps, a lonely thing. But it is better than not being an individual, which is to be nobody at all.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Nowadays, ads don't just sell a product. They sell an attitude! Look at this one! Here's a cool guy saying nobody tells him what to do. He does whatever he wants and he buys this product as a reflection of that independence. So basically, this maverick is urging everyone to express his individuality through conformity in brand-name selection?

Bill Watterson

Courage is being yourself in a world that almost seems to endorse conformity.

Todd William

So distracting, so complete is she that she is gone before many realize that she had no escort, she was alone, a parade of one.

Jerry Spinelli

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

Henry David Thoreau

In addition to conformity as a way to relieve the anxiety springing from separateness, another factor of contemporary life must be considered: the role of the work routine and the pleasure routine. Man becomes a 'nine to fiver', he is part of the labour force, or the bureaucratic force of clerks and managers. He has little initiative, his tasks are prescribed by the organisation of the work; there is even little difference between those high up on the ladder and those on the bottom. They all perform tasks prescribed by the whole structure of the organisation, at a prescribed speed, and in a prescribed manner. Even the feelings are prescribed: cheerfulness, tolerance, reliability, ambition, and an ability to get along with everybody without friction. Fun is routinised in similar, although not quite as drastic ways. Books are selected by the book clubs, movies by the film and theatre owners and the advertising slogans paid for by them; the rest is also uniform: the Sunday ride in the car, the television session, the card game, the social parties. From birth to death, from Monday to Monday, from morning to evening - all activities are routinised, and prefabricated. How should a man caught up in this net of routine not forget that he is a man, a unique individual, one who is given only this one chance of living, with hopes and disappointments, with sorrow and fear, with the longing for love and the dread of the nothing and separateness?

Erich Fromm

The Master said of Gong Yechang, “He is marriageable. Although he was once imprisoned and branded as a criminal, he was in fact innocent of any crime.” The Master gave him his daughter in marriage.(Analects 5.1)

Confucius

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

Joining a sub-culture, any sub-culture, for whatever reason, is as I see it never a legitimate self-expression. It is always a result of sheep mentality; a wish to belong somewhere.

Varg Vikernes

As much as I live I shall not imitate them or hate myself for being different to them

Orhan Pamuk

You laugh at me because I'm different, I laugh at you because you're all the same.

Jonathan Davis

Any fool can do something cool and look cool, but it takes skill to make something uncool cool again.

Criss Jami

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I became one of those anonymous Americans who tries to keep his mind sharp and inquisitive while performing all the humiliating rituals of the middle class

Pat Conroy

And it never even occurs to them their certainty that they are different is what makes them the same.

David Foster Wallace

They want you to use a black umbrella; use yellow, use red, use green and always refuse the thing they want you to use! Refusal is often more honourable than conformity!

Mehmet Murat ildan

Snark often functions as an enforcer of mediocrity and conformity. In its cozy knowingness, snark flatters you by assuming that you get the contemptuous joke. You've been admitted, or readmitted, to a club, though it may be the club of the second-rate.

David Denby

From one dog all the dogs bark.

Marty Rubin

The societies kids naturally form are tribal. Gangs, clubs, packs. But we're herded into schools and terrified into behaving. Taught how we're supposed to pretend to be, taught to parrot all kinds of nonsense at the flick of a switch, taught to keep our heads down and our elbows in and shut off our minds and shut off our sex. We learn we can't even piss when we have to. That's how we learn to be plastic and dumb.

Marge Piercy

A fair and just society offers equality of opportunity to all. But it cannot promise, and should not try to enforce, sameness.

Christina Hoff Sommers

Case by case, we find that conformity is the easy way, and the path to privilege and prestige; dissidence carries personal costs that may be severe, even in a society that lacks such means of control as deathsquads, psychiatric prisons, or extermination camps. The very structure of the media is designed to induce conformity to established doctrine. In a three-minute stretch between commercials, or in seven hundred words, it is impossible to present unfamiliar thoughts or surprising conclusions with the argument and evidence required to afford them some credibility. Regurgitation of welcome pieties faces no such problem.

Noam Chomsky

The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.

George Orwell

Conformity is often more dangerous than war. War destroys the body but confomity destoys the imaginative mind.

Debasish Mridha

If you conform, you can never reform.

Debasish Mridha

Wisdom to accept change creates life, but conformity creates stagnation and leads to death.

Debasish Mridha

Most often we call a person intelligent when they learn to conform to the societal norm. Are they wise?

Debasish Mridha

Do not follow conformity toward the darkness. Follow the light of wisdom to fill the world with happiness.

Debasish Mridha

How can you reform when you are always busy conforming?

Debasish Mridha M.D.

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Conformity Quotes

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