Quotes About Conformity

But I'm old now and Ward has made himself rich and powerful. He has the resources to ensure that one day he'll perfect his standardising system and if that happens, instead of a thousand Wards there will be a hundred thousand, a million, a billion. He'll grow exponentially until there's nothing and no one else left. Just Ward, Ward, Ward in every house, in every town and every city, in every country in the world. Forever.

At a 1937 conference of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, Stalin's people applauded him for eleven consecutive minutes, fearing that the first to stop would be killed or sent to prison. Finally, one man stopped, the director of a paper factory. "To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down," writes Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. That same night the director of the paper factory was arrested and sent to prison for ten years.

the remarkable power of behavior modification techniques, group conformity and obedience to authority. These three factors are known in psychological terms as "influence processes" and demonstrate that situations often determine human behaviors, often more than the values and beliefs of the individual.

think in terms of a continuum of influence: at one end, respectful, ethical, growth-enhancing influence that recognizes the value of individuality, human rights, and creativity; at the other end, conformity, dependency, and slavery, where all authority lies with the leader and the group.

one cannot begin to understand mind control without realizing the power of behavior modification techniques, as well as the influences of conformity and obedience to authority.

She used to look forward to changing in the locker room when other girls stole shocked glances at her emaciated body last spring. Now they would look at her and think she was fat--just as fat as all the other girls, maybe even fatter. Nothing separated her from the parade of thunder thighs trooping up the stairs from the locker room to the gym.

Long hair is an unpardonable offense which should be punishable by death.

Long hair is an unpardonable offence which should be punishable by death.

Art was disgusting. It led to thought, and thought led to dissatisfaction, which in turn led to rebellion.

What motivates people to seek out dubious or frankly bogus treatments? Diverse motivations are likely to be at play, including imitation, conformity, desperation, and indiscriminate reliance on authority figures. According to one survivor of the Spanish flu pandemic: My mother used goose grease and turpentine mixed like a salve, sometimes she made a poultice out of it. I think it really helped. She told me it did, so I had to believe it. (Pettigrew, 1983, p. 120)

Anti-vaccination movements are high-pressure, highly conformist organizations in which dissenting views are discouraged. To the extent that people reject science because they wish to present a self-image as critical and skeptical, it can be useful to communicate to them the inherently skeptical nature of science and to portray antiscientific thinking as an example of unthinking conformity (Hornsey & Fielding, 2017).

Learn the rules before you break them.

And soon all our minds will be flat as a pancake, With no room for genius exaltation or heartache. And our children and theirs will preen, smirk and chatter, With not even the sense to ask what is the matter.

Det är nutidsmänniskans tragik att hon har upphört att våga vara rädd. Det är ödesdigert för därmed följer att hon också successivt tvingas sluta med att tänka.

In my quest to become unique, I've become a statistic.

He considered the hard times in his life. All the things he had been afraid of. All those years wasted, he told himself, because I was terrified of being different. That's why all us fifty-four-year-olds end up looking so much alike. All of us are terrified of being different.

Your grand plan sounds more like 1940s Germany to me. What exactly do you plan to do with people who refuse to register?

What about Hitler? He was one person. They were all doing what Hitler said. What do all prisoners do? They do what the warden says. The only power Hitler had was the power the people gave him. I felt the whole world had gone absolutely mad

The white American is not innately racist. I sense innate docility. He will follow the law if the leadership tells him to do that. He would not rebel if he thought he'd be punished. But if the laws are flouted and winked at, he'll wink, too.' - interview with Leona Brady

Why did these big wheels kill themselves? They weren't able to live up to the standards they were accustomed to, and they got ashamed in front of their women. You see, you can tell anybody a lie, and he'll agree with you. But you start layin' down the facts of real life, he won't accept it. The American white man has been superior so long, he can't figure out why he should come down.

Most people were raised to think they are not worthy. School is a process of taking beautiful kids who are filled with life and beating them into happy slavery. That's as true of a twenty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year executive as it is for the poorest." Bill Talcott - Organizer

Pretending to be 'normal' is a lot harder than you think.

All of us are subjected to somebody else's power at some point. So once in a while you kiss ass. So what? Either you make your peace with that early, or you end up living your life as a crank and a misfit.

I distrust all systematisers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.