Quotes About Conformity

Every day, I put on a suit, and I felt like I was playing dress-up in my mum's closet. It just wasn't right.

You're just one of the guys who fills a suit, and that's what's drilled into you by the record company and the management - 'You're lucky to have it. Now shut your mouth.' I get where that comes from, but it takes time to shake it off.

Gym class was, of course, where the strongest, best-looking kids were made captains and chose us spazzes last. More important, it was where the figures of supposed authority allowed them to do so. Forget the work our parents did molding our minds and values. Everything fell apart as soon as we put on those maroon polyester gym suits.

When I was younger, I used to power dress - I'd wear black and grey and suits all the time, to make it feel like I belonged.

I was a sullen kid who smoked cigarettes and wore black every day, and I went to a school that was lacrosse players and Izods.

Hitler had a police state of the first order. And those who showed any sign of being weak-kneed faced prison or often summary execution. That prevented a lot of people who knew that the war was not going to turn out well for Germany from giving up.

During the Olympics they're really strict about what you're allowed to wear. You get a lot of clothes, but everything is pre-ordered. We had a fitting over the summer. You're not allowed to wear your own clothes. No logos, nothing. You get fined if you wear something you're not supposed to wear.

I would never bring a flag on the summit. If somebody is climbing for a country he is not normal, he is sick.

If I wanted to be Rimbaud, what was I doing in graduate school? Trying to stay out of the army, of course. Graduate study gave me a draft deferment. But I also knew I lacked erudition and polish and was often sunk in forlorn reveries.

For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.

I was super insecure in middle school; I didn't tell anyone I swam because it wasn't the cool sport to be doing.

I want to encourage other people to try to discover who they are, not to try to fit into some superficial prototype of what they think a Christian should be, but to discover who they really are.

Most men are petrified of standing out in any way or being thought superficial.

No one would dream of expecting a single individual to be happy—once someone is married, however, everyone is very astonished when he is not happy!

She was brought up in the reformed Protestant Church but left it at the age of seventeen in protest against its restrictive rules.

Come out of the fog, young man. And remember you don't have to be a complete fool in order to succeed. Play the game, but don't believe in it--that much you owe yourself. Even if it lands you in a strait jacket or a padded cell. Play the game, but play it your own way--part of the time at least. Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate--I wish I had time to tell you only a fragment.

And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself.

I passed on to a window decorated with switches of wiry false hair, ointments guaranteed to produce the miracle of whitening black skin. "You too can be truly beautiful," a sign proclaimed. "Win greater happiness with whiter complexion. Be outstanding in your social set.

I had switched from the arrogant absurdity of Norton and Emerson to that of Jack and the Brotherhood, and it all came out the same—except I now recognized my invisibility. So I'd accept it, I'd explore it, rine and heart. I'd

All they wanted of me was one belch of affirmation and I'd bellow it out loud. Yes! Yes! YES! That was all anyone wanted of us, that we should be heard and not seen, and then heard only in one big optimistic chorus of yassuh, yassuh, yassuh!

in the world is the spectacle of the whites busy escaping blackness and becoming blacker every day, and the blacks striving toward whiteness, becoming quite dull and gray. None of us seems to know who he is or where he's going.

I passed on to a window decorated with switches of wiry false hair, ointments guaranteed to produce the miracle of whitening black skin. You too can be truly beautiful, a sign proclaimed.

What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do? What a waste, what a senseless waste!

I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.