Quotes About Conformity

Its aim is to reconcile you to "the way it is," to make you exactly like everyone else, to render you amenable to societal order and discipline.

Often couples or close friends, even entire families, will enter into tacit compacts whereby each individual pledges (unconsciously) to remain mired in the same slough in which she and all her cronies have become so comfortable.

The highest treason a crab can commit is to make a leap for the rim of the bucket. The

Our society seems to say that a real man needs and wants nobody.

The effects of conformity on beliefs and attitudes are the more injurious because people tend to associate with others who have similar beliefs to themselves. ... the only way to substantiate a belief is to try to disprove it. But because like mixes with like, people are rarely exposed to counter-arguments to their more deeply held convictions, let alone to counter-evidence. Their beliefs conform to those of their associates: hence, there is little possibility of eliminating persistent errors.

My do now consisted of some really nifty spikes on top. I looked like a punker, but it was kind of fun, if you want to know the truth. Next thing I knew I'd be getting my ears pierced and chewing gum in public, social sins my auntie had always warned me about, along with red nail polish and dingy bra straps.

I worried so much about how I looked and whether I was doing things right, I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being one.

I tried for so long to belong, to be as they needed me to be. Now I wish to be myself.

There was nothing I hated worse than clumps of whispering girls who got quiet when I passed. I started picking scabs off my body and, when I didn't have any, gnawing the flesh around my fingernails until I was a bleeding wreck. I worried so much about how I looked and whether I was doing things right, I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being me.

And second, once we are caught in the pattern of creating ourselves from cultural blueprints, it becomes a primary way of receiving validation. We become unknowingly bound up in a need to please the cultural father--the man holding the brush--and live up to his images of what a woman should be and do. We're rewarded when we do; life gets difficult when we don't.

I learned how easy it is to give up and become draperies while everyone else is dancing.

afflicted with the worst female curse on earth, the need to mold myself to expectations.

Martha Whites were a form of punishment only T. Ray could have dreamed up. I shut my mouth instantly.

I worried so much about how i looked and whether i was doing things right, i felt half the time i was impersonating a girl instead of really being one. - Lily

She was a small, hot-tempered woman who wore a widow's cap with strings floating at her cheeks, and when it was cold, a squirrely fur cloak and tiny fur-lined shoes. She was known to line girls up on the Idle Bench for the smallest infraction and scream at them until they fainted. I despised her, and her "polite education for the female mind," which was composed

The truth," she said, "is that every girl must have ambition knocked out of her for her own good. You are unusual only in your determination to fight what is inevitable. You resisted and so it came to this, to being broken like a horse.

The notion of following your heart's desire, of going wherever you chose, did not exist here, and I did not see any way to let them know what it felt like, especially since, after so little time in their system, I had lost my own sense of freedom.

Those skilled at making the enemy move do so by creating a situation to which he must conform; they entice him with something he is certain to take, and with lures of ostensible profit they await him in strength.

It wasn't a matter of jumping on the bandwagon; it was a matter of being run over by it.

I have a bunch of crap in my hair just so I can look nice, and I'm wearing shoes that are going to cripple me. I

Wherever people feel safe (...) they will be indifferent.

But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else.

Wherever people feel safe—this was her bitter, self-accusing point—they will be indifferent.

It was a wonder, after so many years of trying to press herself into society's mold, to suddenly suspect that the problem was with the mold, not with her.