Quotes About Conformity

Because most people ain't people.

If personal meaning, in this cheer leader society, lies in success, then failure must threaten identity itself.

Perhaps because there are those who believe that authority is all of a piece and that to challenge it anywhere is to threaten it everywhere.

When the law is wrong it's because it's unnatural, but in this case it is natural and a river will drown you if you buck it now

The schoolmen peer with dulled eyes from amid the heap of precedents and prescriptions about them, and, distracted by seeing a thing sanctioned neither by precedent nor by prescription, dub the man realist, and rail against him for that his work fits none of their pigeon-holes.

there are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself?

Was die Herde am meisten hasst, ist derjenige, der anders denkt; es ist nicht so sehr die Meinung selbst, sondern die Kühnheit, selbst denken zu wollen.

To form a judgment intuitively is the privilege of few; authority and example lead the rest of the world. They see with the eyes of others, they hear with the ears of others. Therefore it is very easy to think as all the world now think; but to think as all the world will think thirty years hence is not in the power of every one.

Imitation and custom are the spring of almost all human action. The cause of it is that men fight shy of all and any sort of reflection, and very properly mistrust their own discernment. At the same time this remarkably strong imitative instinct

If you want to earn the gratitude of your own age you must keep in step with it. But if you do that you will produce nothing great. If

The anxieties of all of us, our worries, vexations, bothers, troubles, uneasy apprehensions and strenuous efforts are due, in perhaps the large majority of instances, to what other people will say;

We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people." ? Arthur Schopenhauer

That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.

Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. When independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the "Nation," it's time for all of us to sit up and worry.

Faced with the Real World, she clung nervously to old remembered rules, and had no one but herself to rebel against.

once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.

Dava l'impressione di essere sfuggita al guinzaglio. Come se stesse camminando libera mentre tutti gli altri venivano portati a spasso come animali dometici. Quasi ci stese guardando rispettosamente, un po' sovrappensiero, da una certa distanza, mentre noi avanzavamo trotterellando, grati ai nostri padroni, felici di perpetuare la nostra schiavitù.

She grew tired of living a life that wasn't really hers at an address she oughtn't to be at. She had lost the ability to keep her discrete world discrete. The traffic inside her head seemed to have stopped believing in traffic lights.

Perhaps Ammu, Estha and she were the worst transgressors. But it wasn't just them. It was the others too. They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much.

They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much.

What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and at, tempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?

Each of us struggles daily with the pressures of conformity and the loneliness of difference from which those choices seem to offer escape.

We can sometimes work long and hard to establish one beachhead of real resistance to the deaths we are expected to live, only to have that beachhead assaulted or threatened by those canards we have been socialized to fear, or by the withdrawal of those approvals that we have been warned to seek for safety

I get a feeling that American standards are sort of an unspoken norm, and that whether one resists them, or whether one adopts them, they are there to be reckoned with