Quotes About Conformity

Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.

But I must admit I didn´t like that idea; do the same thing as everyone else. Eating to live, living to eat - that had been the nightmare of my adolescence. If it meant going back to that, if would be just as well to turn on the gas at once. But I suppose everyone thinks of things like that: let´s turn on the gas at once. And you don´t turn it on.

Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, I don't want to be just another blade of grass.

Das Glück besteht darin, zu leben wie alle Welt und doch wie kein anderer zu sein.

Les coutures, les modes sont souvent apliquées à couper les corps féminin de a transcendance: la Chinoise aux pieds bandés peut à peine marcher, les griffes vernies de la star d'Hollywood la privent de ses mains, les hauts talons, les corsets, les paniers, les vertugadins, les crinolines étaient destinés moins à accentuer la combrure du corps féminin qu'à en augmenter l'impotence.

O segredo da felicidade e o cúmulo da arte é viver como todo mundo e ser como ninguém.

In fact – and with very few exceptions – when a man joins a party, he submissively adopts a mental attitude which he will express later on with words such as, 'As a monarchist, as a Socialist, I think that . . .' It is so comfortable! It amounts to having no thoughts at all. Nothing is more comfortable than not having to think.

Le beau est le nécessaire, qui, tout en demeurant conforme à sa loi propre et à elle seule, obéit au bien.

It keeps strays in the flock. To word it differently: 'You must live up to the popular code if you believe in it; but if you don't believe in it, then you MUST live up to it!

Just as he was an Elk, a Booster, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his every religious belief and the senators who controlled the Republican Party decided in little smoky rooms in Washington what he should think about disarmament, tariff, and Germany, so did the large national advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality.

I wouldn't care whether it was a laboratory or a carnival. But it's merely safe. Tell me, Mr. Pollock, what is the matter with Gopher Prairie?

Main Street is the climax of civilization. That this Ford car might stand in front of the Bon Ton Store, Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters. What Ole Jenson the grocer says to Ezra Stowbody the banker is the new law for London, Prague, and the unprofitable isles of the sea; whatsoever Ezra does not know and sanction, that thing is heresy, worthless for knowing and wicked to consider.

For the first time in America, except during the Civil War and the World War, people were afraid to say whatever came to their tongues.

His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in April, 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.

Or should he damn Fran instead? Fran to whom life was a fashion- show.

Babbitt looked up irritably from the comic strips in the Evening Advocate. They composed his favorite literature and art, these illustrated chronicles in which Mr. Mutt hit Mr. Jeff with a rotten egg, and Mother corrected Father's vulgarisms by means of a rolling-pin. With the solemn face of a devotee, breathing heavily through his open mouth, he plodded nightly through every picture, and during the rite he detested interruptions.

Now of all the cosmic problems yet unsolved, not cancer nor the future of poverty are the flustering questions, but these twain: Which is worse, not to wear evening clothes at a party at which you find every one else dressed, or to come in evening clothes to a house where, it proves, they are never worn? And: Which is worse, not to tip when a tip has been expected; or to tip, when the tip is an insult?

So far as I can see, he brooded, travel consists in perpetually finding new things that you have to do if you're going to be respectable.

All her life she had striven to do the right thing, but right according to whom?

And anyway, who defines "real life"? Who says "real life" is property ladders and hideous pearl earrings? "Shit-boring tedious life," more like.

Everyone knows, the point of an interview is not to demonstrate who you are, but to pretend to be whatever sort of person they want for the job.

anyway, who defines "real life"? Who says "real life" is property ladders and hideous pearl earrings? "Shit-boring tedious life," more like.

All is disgust when a man leaves his own nature and does what is unfit.

When you are one of several, then you have lost your freedom; you cannot send for your traveling boots whenever you wish, you cannot move aimlessly about in the world. ~ Either/Or