Quotes About Conformity

I would love to take more risks - have pink hair - but it doesn't look right on me.

It wasn't fun to go to school, because we had to wear these blue things around our necks. We had to join the Pioneer Society, and we had to salute with our hands over our eyes. Even then, I was thinking for myself. I thought this wasn't so different from the way the Nazis had conditioned people.

Some persons think that they have to look like a hedgehog to be pious.

In school, I learned about artists and how they were free to express themselves. I was allergic to conformity, and the lifestyle attracted me. I wanted to express myself in a way that slammed people up against the wall.

I understand how hard it is to force yourself to be someone different. By the end of high school, I had taken to doing my math homework up against a concealed wall during lunch because I was tired of socializing.

Trends suck you in, anywhere in the world, patterns you don't even see. It's so easy. Look at Wall Street - look at any sports team in the world - there are trends. Look at exercising. Nothing but patterns and trends, and that's what I started to see. Like a flock of birds all flying in one direction.

In many, many parts of the world, being a female, you're really just wallpaper. If you take care to blend in, no one would think in a thousand years that you were doing anything suspicious.

Why is it that, when we want to think outside the proverbial box, we often put ourselves in one? We gather our team in a conference room, plaster the walls with sticky paper, and wait for the ideas to flow in a stream of marker scribbles. How often has your quest for innovation peaked at renovation - new dressing on old ideas?

I'm getting a bunch more face tattoos, because it doesn't look like I'm ever going to have to apply to a Walmart or Best Buy.

Nobody is convinced that Johnny Depp goes to Walmart dressed as Sweeney Todd, but everyone expects us to.

When you do something moral and upright and wander off by yourself, well, everyone doesn't always follow you, do they, right? You pat yourself on your sanctimonious back but it doesn't mean the crowd rewards you for doing what you think is right.

It's just like anybody else - some people, most people don't wanna go to school. They just don't want to. It's... not fun. I was just somebody who got away with it.

'But I don't want to go among mad people,' said Alice. 'Oh, you can't help that,' said the cat. 'We're all mad here.'

We all want to be normal, but it's relative to individuality. My normal is not your normal.

It's very claustrophobic to live a life which is not really how you wanted to live. You are forcing yourself to be quiet and behave like someone you are not.

When I entered high school I was an A-student, but not for long. I wanted the fancy clothes. I wanted to hang out with the guys. I went from being an A-student to a B-student to a C-student, but I didn't care. I was getting the high fives and the low fives and the pats on the back. I was cool.

I mean, not wanting to be flip about it, but even within a corporation, you get sort of cult-like behaviors sometimes.

No man should have cowboys boots in his wardrobe. That's fair enough, isn't it? Unless you're a cowboy, of course.

The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.'

Even when I was a little kid, I hated to dress up. I hated to put on regular shoes. I wanted to play all the time. I hate to wear any kind of coat or sweater. I've never liked hot. I've never liked to be warm.

I'm very wary of large groups of people getting together and trying to believe the same thing. It never seems to end well, whether it's political or religious or whatever.

But when I went to Harvard, it kind of got washed out of me, partly because people made fun of you in college. If you said you believed in God, they would look at you clinically, you know, suggest that you needed a referral.

No surprise. I was the only one at Dave and Bubba's not wearing a Ragland Rattlers cap. Talk about feeling disloyal. And uncomfortable.

If you find a way to live as you wish, unnatural though it might be, you'll carry on your shoulders the weight of a thousand wives' wishes. Though aloud all may curse you as a very devil.