Quotes About Conformity

What will happen will happen, whether I wish it or no. So, yes, I accept. It does not mean that I like it or wish it were not otherwise.

He thought of the Finishing School for Barbies where long-legged, high-breasted, stomachless girls went to get shaved clean, get their toenails painted pink, their nipples removed, and all body opening sewn shut, except for their mouths, which curved in perpetual smiles and led nowhere.

All well-brought-up people are afraid of having any experience which seems to them uncharacteristic of themselves as they imagine themselves to be.

There are the those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behaviour and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity.

I get glimpses of the horror of normalcy. Each of these innocents on the street is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness. They would do anything to be unique.

Were you and Hope the only ones at that school to have normal names? What was with those people—Buffy, Kiki, Dede, Muffin?' 'Well, dear, they'd already used up the good names for the dogs,' Faith countered archly, and turned off the light.

The right to take a chance, the right to suffer. The right to be unwise, the right to die. These aims are hateful to the government, which values ever frightened mouse and falling sparrow as equal to a tiger burning bright.

We spend our lives crafting masks to fit the roles we are expected to play, but in doing so, we lose sight of who we truly are.

They arose very quickly, became a profession very rapidly, and were all too soon infected with a certain amount of resistance to change. The very programmers whom I have heard almost castigate a customer because he would not change his system of doing business are the same people who at times walk into my office and say, "But we have always done it this way." It is for this reason that I now have a counterclockwise clock hanging in my office. In

Society can be a bitch." "And is by no means always right. Society can't know you like you know yourself. So don't let society be the judge of your actions. Only you can judge you.

As long as our ideas are the same, we will never be apart.

Men are sheep. Which is why armies and wars are possible. They die victims of their stupid docility.

The Catholic schoolgirl in me was scandalized by the thought; I told her we'd been thrown out of Catholic school so she should shut up.

Old School by Tobias Wolff

Que algo sea bueno o aceptado universalmente no es motivo suficiente para rechazarlo.

I was little there were times I wanted my parents to be normal. I wanted them to have a religion. I wanted them to have a job, like the parents of every other kid I went to school with.

The modern Westerner, persuaded that he has a right to "think for himself" and imagining that he exercises this right, is unwilling to acknowledge that his every thought has been shaped by cultural and historical influences and that his opinions fit, like pieces of jigsaw puzzle, into a pattern which has nothing random about it.

How ghastly for her, people actually thinking, with their brains, and right next door. Oh, the travesty of it all.

From a very early age, girls were taught to restrain themselves physically and emotionally.

Ever since romanticism replaced the arranged marriage, the assumption has been that people marry for love. This is largely a myth. Any marriage can evolve into the mutual love of watching each other live. But first marriages are often a matter of conforming to the shoulds of the 20s.

THE SHOULDS ARE defined by the family destiny, the press of the culture, and/or the prejudices of our peers.

What is disassembling is that narrow self we have thus far put together in a form tailored to please the culture and other people.

The thing of it was that the girls in my class who date boys do hardly anything else. Girls who I used to think were just boring I now think stupid beyond belief. I call them A-Girls and it is not a compliment.

See, the 'On the Road' that came out in 1957 was censored. A lot of the honesty of it, the bitter honesty, is in the original scroll version that came out in 2007 on the 50-year anniversary. Back then, there was so much post-Second World War fear that was imposed on everybody - 'You must live life this way' - and these guys were bored.