Quotes About Conformity

Books turn people into isolated individuals, and once that's happened, the road only grows rockier. Books wire you to want to be Steve McQueen, but the world wants you to be [email protected].

It's starts out young- you try not be different just to survive- you try to be just like everyone else- anonymity becomes reflexive- and then one day you wake up and you've become all those other people- the others- the something you aren't. And you wonder if you can ever be what it is you really are. Or you wonder if it's too late to find out.

Society indeed conspires to keep you ball and chained.

You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you worry you are an interchangeable cog.

Sometimes I think the people to feel the saddest for are people who are unable to connect with the profound—people such as my boring brother-in-law, a hearty type so concerned with normality and fitting in that he eliminates any possibility of uniqueness for himself and his own personality. I wonder if some day, when he is older, he will wake up and the deeper part of him will realize that he has never allowed himself to truly exist, and he will cry with regret and shame and grief.

Maybe thinking you're supposed to 'have a life' is a stupid way of buying into an untenable 1950s narrative of what life *supposed* to be. How do we know that all of these people with 'no lives' aren't really on the new frontier of human sentience and preceptions?

How cruel that mankind was forced to conform to the global electronic experience. But all other options had vanished. There no longer existed a country to escape to ("country"—also, what a quaint notion) where people read books and had lives that became stories.

It starts out young - you try not to be different just to survive - you try to be just like everyone else - anonymity becomes reflexive - and then one day you wake up and you've *become* all those other people - the others - the something you aren't. And you wonder if you can ever be what you really *are*. Or you wonder if it's too late to find out.

Jennie had a set of values, but she didn't realize they were different values from the rest of us. She never could understand why she was always in trouble. In the end, I mean. She didn't know what it was that made her angry all the time. I'll tell you what it was. It was very simple: it was our society trying to break her, trying to make her a nice middle-class person.

To you your dream is real because all of your thoughts confirm that it is real. But what is is more real than a thousand thoughts about how things should be. Life will conform neither to the story you tell yourself about it nor your interpretation of it. Believe a single thought that runs contrary to the way things are or have been and you suffer because of it. No exceptions!

In trying to please all, he had pleased none.

There's no reason why women shouldn't behave like rational beings," Simon asserted stolidly. Poirot said drily: "Quite frequently they do. That is even more upsetting!

Everybody is very much alike, really. But fortunately, perhaps, they don't realise it. - Miss Marple

The trouble is that practically everything one does nowadays is illegal," said Giles gloomily. "That's why one has a permanent feeling of guilt.

Everybody is very much alike, really. But fortunately, perhaps, they don't realize it.

But I thought I might have to go to church on Sunday, and although the Archbishop has said one needn't, I still think that the more old-fashioned clergy expect one to wear a hat. But

Man is an unoriginal animal. Unoriginal within the law in his daily respectable life, equally unoriginal outside the law.

And all these girls with their make-up and their hair and their nails look so alike.

Once undressed I felt less exposed. (...) Naked was my uniform. (...) There was no pressure to conform.

Parents aren't supposed to cry. Or get scared. Or lie. Right? I thought I knew all the rules. But there are no rules.

It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.

The promotion of 'average' individual causes a general levelling down.

It seemed an advantage to be traveling alone. Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others...Being closely observed by a companion can also inhibit our observation of others; then, too, we may become caught up in adjusting ourselves to the companion's questions and remarks, or feel the need to make ourselves seem more normal than is good for our curiosity.

Creativity means learning where the rules exist, and then breaking them! Saying, "It's better this way." But you have to know the rules in order to break them with any grace.