Quotes About Conformity

Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of everyone of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.

He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets — most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth.

It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. 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.

Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression.

A man must consider what rich realms he abdicates when he becomes a conformist

The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.

The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. . . . The force of character is cumulative.

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, — under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are.

The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs . . . Whoso would be a man must also be a non-conformist.

En la comunidad, es fácil vivir según ideas ajenas. En la soledad, es fácil vivir según las ideas propias. Pero solo es notable el que, en la comunidad, conseva la independencia.

La naturaleza nos dotará del uniforme de prisión del partido al que nos adherimos.

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression.

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character.

Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right.

As a biblical Christian, I must not only affirm the inspiration of God's Word; I must also consciously critique everything else in light of Scripture (otherwise all else will unconsciously conform my mind to the world, the flesh and the devil). I must make an effort to evaluate my beliefs and lifestyle preferences by God's Word.

Fashion, in Crisp's view, is the art of denying one's individuality in order to adopt the uniforms and dictates of culture, as determined by people who have never met you, and do not care whether you exist. The implicit goal is to cover your imperfections and become something you are not: a person who is acceptable in the eyes of others. A pleasing shell with no discernible interior. In Crisp's words, "Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.

Are we really ever completely our own person or have we been conditioned in ways beyond our own imagination?

Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless.

We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.

People don't talk about anything... No, not anything. They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming pools mostly and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else.