Quotes About Conformity

When I was younger, out in public, I never wanted to pop my hip and definitely made sure that my wrist was nice and firm. All these silly, prohibitive things.

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.

Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.

I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity.

In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it's popular. What I'm saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art.

Die Wahrheit lässt sich nach Geschmack gestalten Denn Wahrheit ist, was alle dafür halten!

Don't take the advice of anyone you meet here. We're all mad.

Being normal isn't that miserable. Try it for a thousand years in a row, and you'll be grateful for a little zaniness.

I'm with Christopher Hitchens on this one. Heaven sounds like North Korea — an eternity of mindless conformity spent singing the praises of a powerful tyrant.

Upholders may struggle in situations where expectations aren't clear or the rules aren't established. They may feel compelled to meet expectations, even ones that seem pointless. They may feel uneasy when they know they're breaking the rules, even unnecessary rules, unless they work out a powerful justification to do so.

Audiences = expectations. If he thinks you're not watching, he won't need to rebel against your expectations.

Novelist Jean Rhys observed, "One is born either to go with or to go against.

Bur surely Rebels eventually realize that we can't just do whatever we want - adults can'ts act that way. Adults can act that way, and Rebels do act that way. For better or worse.

It is a wonderful thing, how no one will allow anyone to live as he likes.

She put him near the front door and a number of visitors were surprised that he would not answer to the name 'Polly', which is what all parrots were supposed to be called.

Some people are Freethinkers from sheer stupidity. My Uncle Sosthenes was one of these. Some people are often religious for the same reason.

Institutionalised love always looks down on her more liberal sister

In contrast, the modern spectacle depicts what society could deliver, but in so doing it rigidly separates what is possible from what is permitted.

The power to homogenize is the heavy artillery that has battered down all Chinese walls.

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not.

The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.

To fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else. (writing of public education in the April 1924 The American Mercury )

relapsing into a bovine, half-amiable normality like that of the other hill-dwellers.