Quotes About Conformity

'Fahrenheit 451' postulates a lot of things I didn't want to have happen.

Most people are happy being average. Most are happy being faceless in a sea of faces.

In life, we are told to do or be so many different things and expected to fit so many different expectations; I think that's something I always had a hard time with.

And that's just what I'm saying. I would never want to be like certain people, who change the way they dress, go out in disguise, wear a big floppy hat and dark shades. I would hate that.

I went to an all-boys school and hated feeling like one of the crowd.

I used to think that people just hate vegans; I have since discovered that everybody hates anyone who abstains from anything.

A man like Wilde was not free to live out of the closet as a homosexual, and women in general were not able to be truly themselves; there was no place for a woman's voice to be heard or for her to express her sexuality.

Men have to be freed from the tortures of heavy clothing that covers everything but the face and hands.

If you listen to the way I speak and watch the way I conduct myself - there's nothing about me that's rock n' roll. It's like, 'Hello, I'm in a rock n' roll band'. 'No, you're a narc.'

The audiences have a certain perspective of every heroine and one should not go against it.

We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.

I was hiding behind athletics and all my jockitude, so I didn't have to deal with being ostracized as the weird art kid.

I never wore full-on eyeliner in high school, but I wanted to.

I thought my high school would either be like 'Beverly Hills 90210' or 'Stand and Deliver' - it was just a run-of-the-mill high school.

In a word, why were they not men at worst, when at best they ought to be more of men than other men?--And here lay the difficulty: by no effort could I get the face before me to fit into the clerical mould which I had all ready in my own mind for it.

He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.

But it was alright, everything was alright, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the Earth goes round the Sun; today, to believe the past is inalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.

You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.

Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.

By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.