Quotes About Conformity

To Sonnet, wearing castoff clothing was just another way to make her different from the other kids at school. As if she needed one more thing to make her different.

When you internalize an author whose vision or philosophy is both rich and out of fashion, you gain a certain immunity from the pressures of the contemporary. The modern world, with it's fads, propaganda, and advertising, is forever trying to herd us into conformity. Great literature can help us to remain fad-proof.

Yet she was an odd little thing, sturdy and round with thick shapeless legs beneath an equally shapeless dress, and with her fine fair hair bobbed in the latest style she had only succeeded in exaggerating the squareness of her appearance. The thought of cutting her hair into that unattractive basin style was horrifying to Phoebe

Authors today wrote so much to a pattern that their public expected it.

I try to act normal. Unfortunately I can do multiple different impressions of normal, and I can't figure out the appropriate one for the moment. I'm dangerously close to simply having to "be myself".

maybe that was what grown-up life was really about. Doing what everyone else thought you should do.

By infinitely multiplying this necessity to conform, at the expense of developing the individual, unique 'self,' society succeeds in making a man 'good.' By frustrating his potential in numberless ways from the time he is born till the time he dies, civilization instills in him a pattern which is so rigid that he is often unable to express his true self at all.

Speech has, indeed, its origin in social conformity.

I was caught between the crossfire of the atheist school and a Baptist church and family. Both had a prescription for how I was supposed to think and behave. On most points, they actually agreed. I was supposed to be clean, have short hair, talk modestly, listen and obey, never fight. Consequently, I was slovenly, grew long hair, and fought every day.

I applaud the courage of he who accepts each and every one of the laws of a game he did not invent and was not asked if he wanted to play

Porque no se había animado a aceptar que la vida es otra cosa, que la vida es aquello que no puede hacerse en compañía de mujeres fieles ni hombres sensatos, porque había cerrado los ojos y se había entregado, como los demás

Cuál es la tarea de todo sistema escolar superior? Hacer del hombre una máquina. ¿Cuál es el medio para ello? El hombre tiene que aburrirse. ¿Cómo se consigue eso? Con el concepto de deber. ¿Quién es su modelo en esto? El filólogo: este enseña a ser un empollón ¿Quién es el hombre perfecto? El funcionario estatal…(

Catcher in the Rye had a profound impact on me-the idea that we all have lots of dreams that are slowly being chipped away as we grow up.

But sometimes one hears an Etiquette-Buster's confession that rings true: "You make me feel guilty." I'm not going to bother, this argument goes, so we need to lower the standard so I don't look bad. On

when all of life is a costume party, costume parties are no longer possible.

Are you aware of the penalties reserved for freethinkers? I could send you to the block. Good.

You have to stand out and you have to fit in. And how you negotiate that tension really defines how fashionable you are.

I stayed indoors most of the time, which kept my skin very white. And my hair was as black as Ilana's. I wore black clothes all the time, just as she did. When I was in elementary school the other girls had called me a witch, scratched me with their nails, giggled behind their notebooks. But now I was in high school and suddenly everyone wore black and had pale skin and cultivated a disheveled haunted look. Now I blended in.

To have a horror of the bourgeois is bourgeois.

We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones.

Menschen konnten nichts anderes sein als Menschen. Sie zogen sich Roben an oder Handschellen und taten, was von ihnen erwartet wurde. In diesem Haus bestand ihre Aufgabe darin, den Phantomschmerz einer amputierten Weltordnung zu erzeugen.

D]ie Urenkel der Nihilisten [...] Was, wenn ihnen Bibel, Grundgesetz und Strafrecht nie mehr gegolten hätten als Anleitung und Regelbuch zu einem Gesellschafsspiel? [...] Wenn wir ihre Gründe nicht mehr verstünden, weil es keine gibt?

Not that I wish to give you any ammunition, but the sad fact of it is-most men are sheep. Where one goes, the rest will follow. And didn't you say you wished to be married?' 'Not to someone who follows you as the lead sheep.

But when he said he couldn't shoot, it just seemed to make an odd sort of sense to tell him that Hermione couldn't dance. It fit, really. Men were supposed to shoot, and women were supposed to dance, and trusty best friends were supposed to keep their foolish mouths shut. Clearly, all three of them needed a bit of instruction.