Quotes About Conformity

This is a recurring theme in schools: if you are quiet, well-behaved and fairly bright you will be ignored, whereas if you are a lunatic who shuts up for five minutes you will be handsomely rewarded. #

When you say 'I want to fit in,' you are essentially volunteering yourself as a victim, and when the thing you want to fit in with is 'society' - well, as 'society' is just another word for government, you're basically begging the government to control you and use you as it wishes for its nefarious purposes, which can be pretty damn nefarious, if 'nefarious' means what I believe it does.

For us to perceive intelligence, it has to fit within our behavioural framework.

Sanity, remember, does not mean living in the same world as everyone else; it means living in the real world.

Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read.

If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it.

Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read.

If we believe we're being watched, we're far less likely to let our minds roam toward opinions that require courage or might take us beyond the bounds of acceptable opinion. We begin to bend our opinions to please our observer.

It's just as well I switched hands: Witches are thought to be left-handed. Perhaps it's true. Rose is no witch and she uses her right hand. We are mirror twins, she and I. What's left for me is right for her; and if I wanted to feel sorry for myself, I might say nothing's right for me.

I deserved a holiday, and I deserved to dispense with the laces and trusses expected of a clergyman's daughter. I wore my oldest frock, which looked remarkably like a potato sack, and I wore very little beneath. I should never have imagined how lovely that feels. It's most freeing, and it gives you the delicious sense you're on your way to moral degeneracy. I shall soon be painting my lips and drinking gin.

Primates are in fact natural conformists. Not only do they imitate, they also like to be imitated.

Neuroimaging studies indicate that imitating people of one's own gender activates reward centers in the brain, whereas imitating people of the opposite gender does not. This doesn't necessarily mean that the brain is in charge, because it too reacts to the environment. But it does suggest that evolution has equipped our young with a feel-good bias to conform to their gender.

In the colonial context the settler only ends his work of breaking in the native when the latter admits loudly and intelligibly the supremacy of the white man's values.

Whether he likes it or not, the black man has to wear the livery the white man has fabricated for him

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

As soon as I learned from my mother that there was a place called school that I must attend willy nilly --- a place where you were obliged to think about matters prescribed by a 'teacher,' not about matters decided by yourself---I was appalled.

A "land of the free" that struggles under the incredible burden of limitless taxes and laws; the home of the "brave" who stay silent to keep their jobs and avoid scrutiny by the IRS or the police.

That man is a creature who needs order yet yearns for change is the creative contradiction at the heart of the laws which structure his conformity and define his deviancy.

Fashion is a tyrant from which there is no deliverance; all must conform to its whimsical

Nur im Irrenhaus sind wir noch frei. Nur im Irrenhaus durfen wir noch denken. In der Freiheit sind unsere Gedanken Sprengstoff.

Morality is herd instinct in the individual.

Morality in Europe today is herd-morality

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.