Quotes About Conformity

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.

Jesus is the prototype man for men. All of us men are only as manly as it relates to the standard set by Jesus. Romans 8:29 helps us to understand this point: "For those He foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brothers." God's design—His divine intent—is for those who are in Jesus to look like Jesus.

One attended one's church, and one stood and one kneeled and one sat at the proper times and did what was required of one, but to scratch beneath this highly lacquered surface was to venture well beyond the pale in that society and invite stares and whispers and certain banishment.

Just do what he says!" the youngest guy said. Quickly they all started to undress until the five men were standing there, naked. They were being held at bay by an old guy and a kid, neither of whom was wearing a shirt. It was a pretty ridiculous scene, lika a game of strip poker that was going horribly wrong.

Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines.

Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.

That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.

We came to realise - first with astonishment, then bitterness, and finally with indifference - that intellect apparently wasn't the most important thing...not ideas, but the system; not freedom, but drill. We had joined up with enthusiasm and with good will; but they did everything to knock that out of us.

Many can't help faking happiness on account of social pressure. Happiness can be viewed as a social duty and sadness is socially not acceptable. ( "C'est quand le bonheur ?" )

Ready-to-wear thinking means absence of critical awareness and lack of ground-breaking judgments. ("Prêt-à-penser")

A group of people was something like a primitive organism, affected by mood and atmosphere and even weather, resistant to change, with each member playing a specific role. Leaders, followers, scourges, clowns—every group had them, and people slipped into their parts as easily as actors taking on familiar stock roles.

Sometimes I think we're all trying to be shadows of each other, trying to buy the same records and everything even if we don't like them. Kids are like robots, off an assembly line, and I don't want to be a robot!

Why is life so difficult? Why can't we be just ourselves and have everyone accept us the way we are?

Trying to be normal is the greatest abnormality in the world.

There is nothing that makes more cowards and feeble men than public opinion.

You see kids, little boys, practicing the jeers of their television heroes--they shape themselves on such models. It's a strange conformity to what's thrust at them; they adopt it and adapt it and play with it.

It's a curse to have a mind if it is illegal to use it. It's a curse to have intelligence if you are forced to cloak it in a lifetime of wilful stupidity.

My success or failure in school was dependent on my ability to follow a curriculum that felt as if it had very little to do with me as a human being.

The American Naming Authority, a collective of women studying the effects of names on behavior, decrees that a name should only have one user. The nearly 1 million American users of the name Mary, for example, do not constitute a unified army who might slaughter all users of the name Nancy, as was earlier supposed, but rather a saturation of the Mary Potential Quotient. Simply stated: Too many women with the same name produces widespread mediocrity and fatigue.

I would like to outsmart the role that is destined for me. But I can't. I have failed to destroy my category.

It was hard not to realize what kind of kid his parents wished they'd had, and when he thought about that kind of kid it was tempting for Paul to want to track, hunt, and eat the little thing.

she worried about whether I had the clothes and social skills to fit in.

a world in which we are not expected to conform to societal rules but society is expected to conform to our own acts of self-definition. That means your child reading "I Am Jazz" but never—never, Gaia forbid!—the Bible.

It's not that everybody hates you. It's that millions of Americans are afraid to say that they agree with you.