Quotes About Conformity

The world is run by one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards. The rest of us, all six billion of us, do pretty much what we are told!

It was as if all of those hundreds of people were costumed for home, for themselves, not for the public promenades.

So, that's it,' he concluded. 'The world is run by one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards. The rest of us, all six billion of us, do pretty much what we are told.

The rest of us, all six billion of us, do pretty much what we are told!

When you're a kid, right, and you're surrounded by all these other kids, and let's say they don't have the same interests or the same goals or the same world view as you... It's difficult because a child doesn't know that there's another way. A child doesn't know that there's another place outside of the systems and hierarchies in school.

See, the 'On the Road' that came out in 1957 was censored. A lot of the honesty of it, the bitter honesty, is in the original scroll version that came out in 2007 on the 50-year anniversary. Back then, there was so much post-Second World War fear that was imposed on everybody - 'You must live life this way' - and these guys were bored.

There was a time that I would have carried a briefcase and worn a monocle were it to even border on socially acceptable.

In Hollywood, more often than not, they're making more kind of traditional films, stories that are understood by people. And the entire story is understood. And they become worried if even for one small moment something happens that is not understood by everyone.

My mother's mantra was, 'How would it look to the neighbors?' And so you don't do anything because you're worried about how it would look to the neighbors.

The clear, unmistakable sign of a bureaucrat is somebody who worries about whether he has a window.

It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we're alive - to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.

I think the whole nerves thing comes into play when we worry about what other people and society will think.

There, they tell me to wear the veil. Here, they are telling me to put my hips in a little girl's skirt, and I am this lovely full woman. You've got this Ph.D. and you're worrying, 'Am I skinny enough?'

Beware, all too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see.

In the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.

The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.

The worst evil is - and that's the product of censorship - is the self-censorship, because that twists spines, that destroys my character because I have to think something else and say something else, I have to always control myself.

We do our worst when we're surrounded by a lot of people who agree with us.

I went through whole scene kid phase from when I was, like, 12 years old to 15. Black eyeliner - I got gauges, which I definitely regret now - and I had the world's worst haircut: it looked similar to a mullet with a rat's tail, essentially. It was not great.

So often, when you're an actor, you're told what to do and what to say and what to wear. Your opinion is, at best, tolerated and, at worst, not wanted.

I was brought up to believe that the worst thing you could do was 'call attention to yourself,' or 'think you were smart.' My mother was an exception to this rule and was punished by the early onset of Parkinson's disease.

Even when we had new clothes, we were told not to wear them. You just didn't draw attention to yourself. Showing off was the worst thing you could do. We could put the clothes in the drawers - but not wear them.

People would ask me about my hobbies and what I liked. I had never been asked those questions because what I thought didn't matter. I didn't know what a hobby was. In North Korea we used 'we,' and to say - 'I like this,' - was the worst thing you could say.

Insecurity is a natural part of human nature, and there are times we feel our stories are not worth telling, so we turn to the people we admire for strength. If we dress like someone everyone thinks is cool, perhaps we'll be seen as cool.