Quotes About Conformity

Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining.

The violence of our time is caused by obedience.

...anyone who attempts to do both, to adjust to his group and at the same time pursue his individual goal, becomes neurotic.

The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.

If you want everything to be nice and straight all the time, then go live in a world made with a triungular ruler.

She was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you.

A 'modern' man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the dead limb of time like lice.

We live in a time when Christians need to be told that they are supposed to live like Christ. That's Weird.

Kitsch is art that follows established rules in a time when all rules in art are put into question by each artist.

Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.

One of the useful things about age is realizing conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating of conformity.

People froze you in place... More important, you froze yourself, often into a person in whom you truly had no interest. So you had a choice: you could continue a masquerade, or you could give up on it.

People froze you in place, Rebecca sometimes thought, trudging through the woods. More important, you froze yourself, often into a person in whom you truly had no interest. So you had a choice: you could continue a masquerade, or you could give up on it.

To my mind, fashion is one of the wickedest things in the world.

Those whose actions are forever before our eyes, whose words are ever in our ears, will naturally lead us, albeit against our will, slowly, gradually, imperceptibly, perhaps, to act and speak as they do.

Habitual associates are known to exercise a great influence over each other's minds and manners. Those whose actions are forever before our eyes, whose words are ever in our ears, will naturally lead us, albeit against our will, slowly, gradually, imperceptibly, perhaps, to act and speak as they do.

In Wildfell Hall, moral disease has become a norm.

But it's the same with all my friends, just fun and joking, nothing more. I can never bring myself to talk of anything outside the common round.

The whole game in the fifties and early sixties was for no one to know who you really were. We children were witness to the total pretense of how our parents wanted the world to see them. We helped them maintain this image, because if anyone outside the family could see who they really were deep down, the whole system, the ship of your family, might sink. We held our breath to give the ship buoyancy. We were little air tanks.

This is a difficult country to look too different in—the United States of Advertising, as Paul Krassner puts it—and if you are too skinny or too tall or dark or weird or short or frizzy or homely or poor or nearsighted, you get crucified. I did. But

Maybe what you care most passionately about are fasting and high colonics—cappuccino enemas, say. This is fine, but we do not want you to write about them; we will secretly believe that you are simply spiritualizing your hysteria. There are millions of people already doing this at churches and New Age festivals across the land.

little girls baked and learned to dust furniture, and this pleased everyone—briefly. When I was needy, shy, worried, deeply sensitive, too skinny or, later, overweight—in other words, most me—not so much.

I do not always observe the rules of society, but I am quite aware of what they are!

I really do not mind walking two paces behind a man, you know—if only I can find one who can walk two paces faster than I! It is being tied at the knees by convention I hate—and having to pretend I am lame to suit someone else's vanity.