Quotes About Conformity

Just because gladiator shoes are in, everybody can't start flaunting those.

I like getting up when everyone else does and going home when everyone else does.

My mother started out by being a very good girl. She did everything that was expected of her, and it cost her dearly. Late in her life, she was furious that she had not followed her own heart; she thought that it had ruined her life, and I think she was right.

The challenge is how strange and different my voice sounds, so I have tried to sound like other people and tried to be something I wasn't. I have tried to be a soul singer because someone else thought that a good idea. Not because I did.

Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups.

No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.

He who obeys, does not listen to himself!

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academics, custom, fashion, and human cowardice, all of which limit it to a fake learnedness.

Society tames the wolf into a dog. And man is the most domesticated animal of all.

One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole…But nothing exists apart from the whole!

It is obvious that my head does not stand properly on my shoulders; for it is well known that everyone else knows better than I what I should do and not do: only I, poor rogue, do not know what I should be at. Are we not all like statues with the wrong heads on them? Isn't that so, my dear neighbor? - But no, you, precisely you, are the exception.

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.

He who strays from tradition becomes a sacrifice to the extraordinary; he who remains in tradition is its slave. Destruction follows in any case.

Man verdirbt einen Jüngling am sichersten, wenn man ihn anleitet, den Gleichdenkenden höher zu achten, als den Andersdenkenden.

He who seeks may easily get lost himself. All solitude is wrong: so say the herd. And long did you belong to the herd.

Everyone wants the same; everyone is the same; he who has other sentiments goes voluntarily into the madhouse.

To me, the masses seem to be worth a glance only in three respects: first as blurred copies of great men, presented on bad paper with worn out printing plates, then as the resistance against the great men, and finally as working implements of the great. For the rest, let the devil and statistics carry them off!

The formation of a herd is a significant victory and advance in the struggle against depression.

A man as he ought to be: that sounds to us as insipid as a tree as it ought to be.

Todos querem o mesmo, todos são iguais: o que pensa de outro modo tende a ir para o manicómio.

Reduce man to a single type and he is certain to succumb, sooner or later, to the inevitable disaster that his one type cannot cope with.

You find yourself going by the book instead of by your head. You're covered, if you go by the book—no matter what happens. And you might just as well be dead!