Quotes About Conformity

Purple has always been my favorite color... but purple, when I was a little kid, was a color that boys weren't really allowed to wear. That's what all the kids at school told me. I filled my wardrobe with as much purple as I could possibly find, because who cares? Life's too short to dress by other people's rules.

It's only the losers named 'Dave' that think having an unusual name is bad, and who cares what they think? They're named 'Dave.'

I didn't know who the hell I was. I was whoever they wanted me to be.

First of all, whoever didn't want to be a member of this association or the other association, was branded, you know, like a dangerous individualist, you know, infected by the Western decadence, you know. So everybody joined.

I think that we all desperately try to fit in to different molds: our parents, our bosses, our partners, social status, friends. We all figure out a look that we think will get us the job or make his parents approve of us or get that girl to want to go on a date, whatever. We all change ourselves to please whoever it is.

Despite what people think, I was such a rule follower at school. I loved the whole slacker look, like, 'Hey, I don't care, whatever,' but if I didn't turn my homework in, I would panic.

When I was at school, I was forced to play lacrosse, a game in which tiny, rock-hard missiles fly at your head, and you must catch them with a stick to avoid a brain haemorrhage. I was regularly punished for not taking part more wholeheartedly.

No one wants to look wholesome at 21!

We are half ruined by conformity, but we should be wholly ruined without it.

In high school I became a vegetarian more times than I can now remember, most often as an effort to claim some identity in a world of people whose identities seemed to come effortlessly.

I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures. Why do good people sometimes act evil? Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?

Why does your mind conform? Have you ever asked? Are you aware that you are conforming to a pattern? It doesn't matter what that pattern is, whether you have established a pattern for yourself or it has been established for you.

Boarding school is a wicked thing.

I love wide and long pieces, but my agency hates it when I wear wide pants because they drown me.

I think most of us are raised with preconceived notions of the choices we're supposed to make. We waste so much time making decisions based on someone else's idea of our happiness - what will make you a good citizen or a good wife or daughter or actress. Nobody says, 'Just be happy - go be a cobbler or go live with goats.'

My mother hoped I would meet a nice doctor or barrister or accountant who would marry me and take me to live in what is now called Fashionable Dublin Four. But she felt that this was a vain hope. I was a bit loud to make a nice professional wife, and anyway, I was too keen on spending my holidays in far flung places to meet any of these people.

There was definitely a wild side to me that couldn't run free growing up in England.

An education system suits some more than others. It can lead you out into life or lead you on a wild goose chase. It can help to make you miserable, or dull and nasty and insipid, or profoundly stupid in the special way that 'brainy' people can be.

People, like sheep, tend to follow a leader - occasionally in the right direction.

I've always been kind of a play-by-the-rules girl; I tend to like things structured, predictable, and sometimes even a little boring.

I like the freedom America has. In Japan people tend to think too much about others' opinions and how to be like everybody else but to Americans it seems more important to be who you are and find your own way.

We are more likely to cheat if we see others doing so. We tend to conform to accepted norms of reasonable behaviour, rather than adhere to strict rules.

Our schools too often want to shut people up so they can't talk about real solutions. People who think differently tend to clam up because they think something is wrong with their ideas.

What concerns me, is the general social tendency to enforce a level, above which nothing rises and stands out.