Quotes About Conformity

In college - while figuring the things out that most people do in college - I had no game. No confidence. I had Birkenstocks. And overalls. A budding romance novel addiction. But no cool. No poise. I was trying on a thousand different personalities, but a lot of them were formed by the perceptions of others.

When your family is twice as weird as normal, you have to be twice as polite to authority, because authority hates weird.

Being in on the secret might be a lot of fun when you're a kid, but not so much once you realize how often life hinges on everyone agreeing--at least outwardly--on the same reality.

Imagine if that was the best compliment you ever received. "Wow, you are really normal",' before pointing out that, generally speaking, compliments tend to be more along the lines of 'You are extraordinary', 'You step outside the box', or 'You're amazing'. 'So if people want to be these things, why are so many people striving to be normal? Why are people pouring their brilliant individual light into a mold?

On both sides of the highway I could see the rows of little frame houses, all alike, as if there were only one architect in the city and he had a magnificent obsession.

I'm sick of always doing the professional thing for prudential reasons.' I

The saved man seeks to conform himself to the Word and will of God; the self-righteous man seeks to conform God and the world to his word and will. The

Willingness to conform to Islamic law, even in the face of doubt, spiritual aridity, and dark nights of the soul, is the mark of a serious Muslim.

O meu nome diz o que devo ser, o que devo pensar, o que devo falar. Meu nome é uma gaiola em que estou preso. Mas se, ao acordar, eu tiver me esquecido do meu nome, terei esquecido também de tudo que se espera de mim. Se nada se espera de mim, estou livre para ser aquilo que nunca fui. Começarei a viver minha vida a partir de mim mesmo e não a partir do nome que me deram e pelo qual sou conhecido.

Power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every manifestation of life into the straitjacket of its laws. Its intellectual form of expression is dead dogma, its physical form brute force.

One who is constantly striving to force everything into a mechanical order at last becomes a machine himself and loses all human feeling.

Lesser breeds without the Law.

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

Everyone says she's mad.' 'How do they know?' I asked. 'Because she's different from other people, I suppose.' 'Is that being mad?' 'No. Not really, I suppose madness is not seeing things as others see them.

As children we are all individualists; it is only as we grow older that we acquire a certain grey similarity to each other.

As Grandfather used to say, 'In a crowd, everyone plays follow-the leader, even when they don't know who's leading.

Rebellious schoolboys are unwelcome in a technologically advanced, moralistic, exam-oriented society. We prefer a polished Bill Gates to an eccentric Einstein. Eccentrics do unpredictable things, and we have become afraid of the unpredictable.

The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.

As Robert Mulholland says: "Our cross is the point of our unlikeness to the image of Christ, where we must die to self in order to be raised to God into the wholeness of life in the image of Christ. . . . So the process of being conformed to the image of Christ takes place right there at that point of our unlikeness to Christ.

It was useless arguing with people like her. They had stereotyped minds that ran along grooves of stock response and the commonplace.

Parents, teachers, government - they all teach you how to live the dreary, deadening life of a slave, but nobody teaches you how to live normally.

This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we were sorted and classified. Being a high school student was the first step toward becoming a domestic animal.

If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it.

Tak d?ugo byli?cie antykonformistami, a? wreszcie upad?y ostatnie normy, przeciw którym mo?na si? by?o jeszcze buntowa?. Dla mnie nie zostawili?cie ju? nic, nic! Brak norm sta? si? wasz? norm?. A ja mog? si? buntowa? tylko przeciw wam, czyli przeciwko waszemu rozpasaniu.