Quotes About Conformity

Artists—or, in the local parlance, creatives—should no longer push any envelope, go to the dark side, explore taboos, make inappropriate jokes or offer contrarian opinions. We could, but not if we wanted to feed our families.

Even though I had always sexualized Thom Wright everyone else now realized he was built, the jawline seemed more pronounced, the hair was now shorter—somewhat ubiquitous among the guys at Buckley (mostly because of haircut regulations) but Thom's was now something stylish, a moment, a cue to manliness

Everyone has to be the same, and have the same reactions to any given work of art, or movement or idea, and if you refuse to join the chorus of approval you will be tagged a racist or a misogynist. This is what happens to a culture when it no longer cares about art.

The greatest crime being perpetrated in this new world is that of stamping out passion and silencing the individual.

The next morning over a breakfast of bran muffins and kiwi and Evian water and wheatgrass juice, Ann mentioned something about buying a BMW and I had to hold back a scream. It was clear that this had not been my best term; it was clear that I was losing it

With few ambitions, most people allowed efficient machines to perform everyday tasks for them. Gradually, humans ceased to think, or dream... or truly live.

Absolute rules are for unthinking people. Sheep require fences—humans do not.

Rules are for old men who prefer to walk in the wheel ruts of history

The boy I used to know as Thomas Merker has been erased--replaced with a personality programmed by television and commercials to act a certain way.

Mediocrity is the best camouflage known to man.

If the incision of our words amounts to nothing but a feeling, a slow motion, it will still cut a better swath than the factory model, the corporate model, the penitentiary model, which by my lights are one and the same.

it's telling yourself that you want the things that society tells you you should want. women thikn that survival depends on conformity. but for some women, conformity is death. it's a death to the soul. the soul, she said, is a precious thing. when you live a lie, you damage the soul.

So much of being a woman is telling lies, isn't it?" Victory asked. "It's telling yourself that you want the things that society tells you you should want. Women think that survival depends on conformity. But for some women, conformity is death. It's a death to the soul. The soul," she said, "is a precious thing. When you live a lie, you damage the soul.

He just wanted to blend in quietly and not be noticed, like a bug on a riverbank.

Russell commented that the development of such gifted individuals (referring to polymaths) required a childhood period in which there was little or no pressure for conformity, a time in which the child could develop and pursue his or her own interests no matter how unusual or bizarre.

Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other peoples' convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well-treated by culture.

But Miles had always approached life differently than he, always preferring to blend in with his surroundings rather than to shape them, always preferring to make do. He just didn't understand that there were some things in life a man simply should not accept.

you had to settle for what you were given and be grateful.

There were those who loved liberty, who cried out to live their own lives, to strive, to rise above, to achieve, and those bent on the mindless equality of stagnation brought about through the enforcement of an artificial, arbitrary, gray uniformity--those who wanted to transcend through their own effort, and those who wanted others to think for them and were willing to pay the ultimate price.

She had lived her whole life on shifting quicksand, where reason and the intellect were not to be trusted, where only faith was valid, and blind faith was sacred. She, herself, had enforced mindless conformity to that empty evil.

Even a good person can be swept up with the sentiments of a crowd and come to hold perverse beliefs.

don't be a soldier in this silent army of fools.

She was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you.

You did something because it had always been done, and the explanation was, 'But we've always done it this way.' A million dead people can't have been wrong, can they?