Quotes About Conformity

The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it's one of the shapes money takes when it freezes.

Because citizens were always a bit like inmates and inmates were always a bit like citizens, so Consilience and Positron have only made it official.

What good is it to throw yourself in front of a steamroller out of moral principles and then be crushed flat like a sock emptied of its foot? Better to fade into the crowd, the piously praising, unctuous, hate-mongering crowd. Better to hurl rocks than to have them hurled at you. Or better for your chances of staying alive.

To have them sizing him up. To have them thinking, He can't do it, he won't do, he'll have to do, this last as if he were a garment, out of style or shoddy, which must nevertheless be put on because there's nothing else available. To

For a time I almost believed what I understood I was supposed to believe. I numbered myself among the faithful for the same reason that many in Gilead did: because it was less dangerous.

When it was raining we would sit at this table and draw in our scrapbooks with crayons or colored pencils, anything we liked. In school you had to do what the rest were doing.

But the truth is that I don't know what the villagers thought or talked about, I was so shut off from them. The older ones occasionally crossed themselves when we passed, possibly because my mother was wearing slacks, but even that was never explained.

Let's pretend this, let's pretend that. They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.

That's one thing that amazes me about society. That is, that you can do damn near anything and nobody's gonna say anything or notice.

I did not worry about what a man or woman personally believed, but the nation's official religion should be outwardly practiced by all its citizens. A religion was a political statement. Being a Calvinist, a papist, a Presbyterian, an Anglican labeled a person's philosophy on education, taxes, poor relief, and other secular things. The nation needed an accepted position on such concerns. Hence the fines for not outwardly conforming to the national church.

Dominant people, it appears, use snap judgements and conform to received wisdom more than do the less dominant. Those who need power, and those who have it, think differently.

All really nice girls wonder when men don't try to kiss them. They know they shouldn't want them to and they know they must act insulted if they do, but just the same, they wish the men would try.

In fact, the mothers of all her girl friends impressed on their daughters the necessity of being helpless, clinging, doe-eyed creatures. Really, it took a lot of sense to cultivate and hold such a pose.

Men should either be clean shaven, mustached or wear full beards. "That little wisp looks like it was just the best he could do," she thought

How closely women crutch the very chains that bind them!

Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines.

You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.

A lot of teenagers today are influenced by the media's depiction of perfection. I want readers to understand they don't have to follow the unofficial laws society creates, to be liked by others.

A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, "You are mad; you are not like us."

Only good girls keep diaries. Bad girls don't have time.

If you spend too much time worrying about how other people perceive you, you'll never break the rules.

He was swimming in a sea of other people's expectations. Men had drowned in seas like that.

Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man.

You know what happened the last time a group of people said, 'Screw it, we don't care what you think'? They got hung as witches.