Quotes About Conformity

Normalization creates culture, and culture drives our choices, which leads to more normalization.

Schools have figured this out. They need shortcuts in order to successfully process millions of students a year, and they've discovered that fear is a great shortcut on the way to teaching compliance.

120. What's It for? We have a meeting at 4:00 p.m. Okay, what's it for? Well, we always have this meeting . . . So, the "what's-it-for" is: It's easier to maintain the status quo than to risk not having the meeting. What the meeting is for is making sure that the people who like having the meeting aren't upset.

Curious people count. Not because there are a lot of them, but because they're the ones who talk to people who are in a stupor. They're the ones who lead the masses in the middle who are stuck. The masses in the middle have brainwashed themselves into thinking it's safe to do nothing, which the curious can't abide.

She had been, in short, the inevitable result of everything she had been raised to be, frothy and naïve, a girl with barely a notion of her own universe, its rights and its monstrous wrongs.

Maybe I'm not so different from everyone else after all. It's like somebody gave me a puzzle, but I don't have the box with the picture on it. So I don't know what the final thing is supposed to look like. I'm not even sure if I have all the pieces.

Only mavericks live in accordance with their desires, and even they don't often get away with it. They are usually labeled as troublemakers and gotten rid of.

do whatever it was they expected her to do because they were always expecting her to do something more or be something more until it didn't feel like there was enough of her left to go around.

Me ha hablado de la presión social, lo que por lo visto quiere decir dejar que los demás te dirijan la vida.

I was young and frightened and craved respect and its ugly cousin, approval, so I did as I was told.

I thought maybe if you wore different clothes at school,' Paul said, 'maybe you could start a trend. You'd be original.' 'Oh, my God,' she said. 'It's high school, Dad. People get beat up for being original.

So, back in the day, weird people threatened the strength of the tribe. If you weren't good for making food, shelter, or babies, then you were tossed out on your own." "But we're not primitive like that anymore." "Oh, yes, we are. Weird people still get banished." "You mean weird people like

Well, you should be more careful where you drive," the officer said. "You're making people nervous. You don't fit the profile of the neighborhood." I wanted to tell him that I didn't really fit the profile of the country but I knew it would just get me into trouble.

It can undermine the most sincere parental commitment and force adoptees to suffer in private, choosing either rebellion or conformity as a mode of relating.

Did they practice looking suspicious in mirrors? Welcome to the United States. Don't even think about chewing gum the wrong way.' (Carlos)

Institutions do all the things that are supposed to be bad. They impede personal exploration. They enforce conformity. But they often save us from our weaknesses and give meaning to life.

It's unrealistic to live your life within such strict parameters.

Doubtless, the life of an Irregular is hard; but the interests of the Greater Number require that it shall be hard.

It is the fate of every great achievement to be pounced upon by pedants and imitators who drain it of life and turn it into an orthodoxy which stifles all stirrings of originality.

I don't understand how most pop stars live this life being told what to do, what to wear, all the time. Maybe money does mean more to some people.

Wearing a scrap of colored cloth around your neck, even though it serves no useful purpose, but which answers to the name of "tie."

Children, for whom suburban life was supposed to make wholesome little Johns and Wendys, became the acid-dropping, classroom-burning hippies of the 1960s.

Little would be wanting to the happiness of life, if every man could conform to the right as soon as he was shown it.

I'm very grateful that I have one of those faces that seems to blend back into the crowd. A lot of people pay lip service to wanting a normal life, but it's actually very important to me.