Quotes About Conformity

To be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody but yourself—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight—and never stop fighting." "Staying

Not enough people are taking smart risks or creating and sharing bold ideas to meet changing demands and the insatiable need for innovation. When people are afraid of being put down or ridiculed for trying something and failing, or even for putting forward a radical new idea, the best you can expect is status quo and groupthink.

Shame comes from outside of us—from the messages and expectations of our culture.

I drank and smoked to minimize my feelings of vulnerability and to look busy when all of the other girls at my table had been asked to dance. I literally needed something to do, something to help me look busy.

We know how to chameleon our way through the day

Belonging is being somewhere where you want to be, and they want you. Fitting in is being somewhere where you really want to be, but they don't care one way or the other. Belonging is being accepted for you. Fitting in is being accepted for being like everyone else. I get to be me if I belong. I have to be like you to fit in.

But I have plenty of experience with trying to meet everyone's expectations so they won't reject me. It's easy to become a slave to that - to lose yourself in it.

If I did not wear torn pants, orthopedic shoes, frantic disheveled hair, that is to say, if I did not tone down my beauty, people would go mad. Married men would run amuck.

It is through such failure and weeping that the Abba of Jesus conforms us to the image of His Son. Yet if our faith is not alive and dynamically operative, suffering is absurd, pointless.

La gente que interfería en tu vida siempre lo hacía por tu bien, y finalmente me di cuenta de que lo que querían era que te sometieras por completo, que no te diferenciaras del modelo superficial comúnmente aceptado y que después te difuminaras como lo haría un viajante en un convención, del modo más aburrido y estúpido que se puede imaginar.

The world is evil only when you become its slave.

The more we come to depend on the images offered to us by those who try to distract us, entertain us, use us for their purposes, and make us conform to the demands of a consumer society, the easier it is for us to lose our identity.

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.

If I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?

As to conforming outwardly and living your own life inwardly, I do not think much of that.

The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains.

I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?

The rich man is always sold to the institution which makes him rich.

But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run amok against society; but I preferred that society should run amok against me, it being the desperate party.

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies

Men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men.

It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herd so diligently follow.

I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They only can force me who obey a higher law than I. They force me to become like themselves. I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live? When I meet a government which says to me, Your money or your life, why should I be in haste to give it my money?