Quotes About Conformity

It is an error to suppose that courage means courage in everything. Most people are brave only in the dangers to which they accustom themselves.

I was told that whistling wasn't ladylike, but I knew even then that women were simply not supposed to be that happy.

Society is a made-up formula of what we are supposed to be, kept alive by those who believe in it.... I laugh in the ugly face of society, with all its fabricated dimensions.

They shall see eye to eye.

Great minds think alike, and fools seldom differ.

Obedience is only practiced by the cowardly.

We are not supposed to all be the same, feel the same, think the same, and believe the same. The key to continued expansion of our Universe lies in diversity, not in conformity and coercion. Conventionality is the death of creation.

Where do I come into all of this? Am I just some animal or dog?' And that started them off govoreeting real loud and throwing slovos at me. So I creeched louder still, creeching: 'Am I just to be like a clockwork orange?

To be properly wicked, you do not have to break the Law. Just observe it to the letter.

Most people end up being conformists; they adapt to prison life. A few become reformers; they fight for better lighting, better ventilation. Hardly anyone becomes a rebel, a revolutionary who breaks down the prison walls. You can only be a revolutionary when you see the prison walls in the first place.

Studying ice crystals as a graduate student, he eventually found the basic design (equilateral, equiangled hexagon) so icily repeated, so unerringly conforming, that he couldn't help but shudder: Beneath the splendor--the filigreed blossoms, the microscopic stars--was a ghastly inevitability; crystals could not escape their embedded blueprints any more than humans could. Everything hewed to a rigidity of pattern, the certainty of death.

Te parece correcto —le pregunta— hacer algo solo porque todo el mundo lo hace?

How can one country make another change its clocks? What if everybody refuses?" "Then a lot of people will be early. Or late.

and how could Neumann Two not have known, but of course he didn't, because that is how things are with Neumann Two, with everybody in this unit, in this army, in this world, they do as they're told, they get scared, they move about with only themselves in mind. Name me someone who does not.

Werner is beginning to see, approaching his sixteenth birthday, that what the führer really requires is boys. Great rows of them walking to the conveyor belt to climb on.

how could Neumann Two not have known, but of course he didn't, because that is how things are with Neumann Two, with everybody in this unit, in this army, in this world, they do as they're told, they get scared, they move about with only themselves in mind. Name me someone who does not.

É certo — pergunta Jutta — fazer algo apenas porque todas as outras pessoas estão fazendo?

Is it right," Jutta says, "to do something only because everyone else is doing it?

How can one country make another change its clocks? What if everybody refuses?

A portrait of the führer glowers over every classroom. Learning happens on backless benches, at wooden tables grooved by the boredom of countless boys before them—squires, monks, conscripts, cadets.

Good evening, he thinks. Or heil Hitler. Everyone is choosing the latter.

Is it right," Jutta says, "to do something only because everyone else is doing it?

So we teach them how to sit still, how to obey bells, how to make insipid clichés pass for thought, how to be "subversive" in trivial and uniform ways, how to think "outside the box" of tradition and wisdom and into the stainless steel cage of the politically "correct," how to extend the political pinky while sipping the political tea.

Kafka is not interested in documenting the manners and mores of any particular place; he is not interested in probing the psyche of individual characters.