Quotes About Conformity

All those boys and girls out there, once they'd passed through the Hitler Youth and the Labor Service and the army, they were like the children in the saga, children who'd been raised by wild animals to rip apart and devour their own mothers.

Young Helwig was in good standing as a member of the Hitler Youth and at the garden school and he did well everywhere. He was a strong, honest, handy boy. He was sure the men who were imprisoned in the Westhofen concentration camp belonged in that place just as much as crazy people belonged in an insane asylum.

Now look, for instance, at the way they serve dogs, cutting off their tails to make them look plucky, and shearing up their pretty little ears to a point to make them look sharp

early development of the region's secret police. Through both reading and conversations, I sought to understand how ordinary people learned to cope with the new regimes; how they collaborated, willingly or reluctantly; how and why they joined the party and other state institutions; how they resisted, actively or passively; how they came to make terrible choices that most of us in the West, nowadays, never have to face.

Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."3 Strictly defined, a totalitarian regime is one that bans all institutions apart from those it has officially approved. A totalitarian regime thus has one political party, one educational system, one artistic creed, one centrally planned economy, one unified media, and one moral code.

Some sang because they were afraid not to sing. But quite a few of them simply didn't listen to the words or weren't interested in them. Indeed, many of those who clapped at the leaders' speeches, or who mouthed slogans at meetings, or who marched in May Day parades did so with a certain odd ambivalence.

I]f you adapted too much in order to deal with them, you ran the risk of forgetting who you were and you could end up being neither and nothing.

I couldn't understand the mindless acceptance of dogma, an acceptance people were quick to call faith.

God's purpose for us is not to make us healthy, happy, prosperous, and problem-free. His ultimate purpose is to conform us to the image of His own dear Son, that we might bear much fruit to His glory.12 And sometimes, in fulfilling that purpose, He allows us to be hurt.

Those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son. ROMANS 8:29

Your own gown is most delicately suitable, both to the occasion and to yourself,' to be translated: Your gown is insipid and entirely forgettable. If you wear it on every other occasion this entire season, no one will notice or care.

You wanted to live inside the lines where the ordinariness of everything would protect you from the dragons that lay at the edge of the map ready to blow fire in your face if you strayed off course, to the edge of the known world.

All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children. [...] I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.

and then she realized: they WERE all alike!

Hazel understood. Being grown up meant doing what grown-ups wanted you to do. it meant sacrificing your imagination for rules. It meant sitting quietly in you chair while your best friend is helicoptered off for emergency eye surgery. It meant letting people say whatever they wanted to you.

That was before Iris understood that there is a difference between the things you have in your head and the things you present to the world—that sometimes you have to fit yourself into certain shapes, ones other people can easily name.

Raised to be God-fearing, if not religious, both Violet and Faye came to think of all this - their lives as silent, fettered wives and mothers - as the trade-off for marrying well

shapes we had to take in order to please others: the shapes that we hate. Our true selves are the selves we would have been had no one tried to break or shame or change us. Our true selves are what those who actually love us see in us. Our true selves are who we have always been, even if they have been in hiding all this time. Our true selves are who we will, in that sheer blue zone above self-loathing, always be.

The mob thinks we are maladjusted. Of course we are adjusted just fine, not to their frequency. They take it personally.

But what can I do? I can—she leapt into the abyss—join a ladies' club. There! That's respectable! That's something I can do! I can be ladylike. Why, I can be more ladylike than anyone, as long as I can keep myself from saying the first thing that pops into my mind.

Don't you mind, Jottie? Don't you want to have what other people have? Just the regular things, you know, like a date or a kiss or a marriage?

A higher chance of failing is more tolerated on paths that don't rock the boat. After all, what's the go-to defense in a postmortem after we make a decision that doesn't work out? "I followed procedure," or "I stuck with the status quo," or "I made the consensus choice.

In their opinion, writing was dangerous, like touching your privates or grimacing like a dingo.

Uma ideia fixa: "O que vão pensar da gente?" (os vizinhos, os clientes, todo mundo). A regra básica era sempre dar um jeito de escapar à crítica dos outros, sendo muito educado, não emitindo opiniões, ou vigiando o tempo todo o próprio temperamento, para não deixar escapar nada que pudesse ser julgado pelos outros.