Quotes About Conformity

Habit is a great deadener.

He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.

The despotism of custom is everywhere standing up to human advancement.

Life is livable because we know that wherever we go most of the people we meet will be restrained in their actions toward us by an almost instinctive network of taboos.

The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head.

If you have an over-preoccupation with perception and trying to please people's expectations, then you can go mad.

I felt like high school for me was like a big whirlpool of me trying to figure out what was OK for me to do.

Like the 'test tube babies' born of in vitro fertilization, cloned children need not be identifiable, much less freaks or outcasts.

Demands for solidarity can quickly turn into demands for groupthink, making it difficult to express nuance.

Words fashioned with somewhat over precise diction are like shapes turned out by a cookie cutter.

I went from being a jock to a hippie. It was a very clear-cut decision. I had to be one or the other. I had to forsake that other aspect of myself. Or thought that I had to, which is regrettable. Quickly, I was back in the pine trees with the hippies, listening to my Jimi Hendrix and my Janis Joplin and turning on, tuning in, and dropping out.

If you teach a child that appearance doesn't matter, what will be the next thing that child asserts her individuality over? Turning up on time? Turning up at all?

While everyone usually turns up late at Bollywood parties, I always reach these places on time and end up making a fool of myself.

Even if I had a tuxedo I wouldn't wear it to school.

There are a lot of things about the TV industry that make you try to change who you are to fit into a certain mold.

It evolved out of the idea to make a kids TV show. And it actually turned out to be a bit dull and a bit regulated and too many people looking over your shoulder and it wasn't really.

We were little girls coming off of a TV show and had a team of people trying to sculpt us into something we weren't.

America's Facebook generation shows a submission to standardization that I haven't seen before. The American adventure has always been about people forgetting their former selves - Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac went on the road. If they had a Facebook page, they wouldn't have been able to forget their former selves.

For my teen years and all of my twenties it felt like I was trying to live up to this expectation of being a man and what that meant - not just what clothes I wore, but how I acted.

When I was in my teens and twenties, I could see friends expressing how radical they were, and I envied them, the way they lived, the way they dressed. Maybe there is a part of me that is reserved, even in rebellion.

The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.

If you haven't turned rebel by twenty you've got no heart; if you haven't turned establishment by thirty you've got no brains!

People want you to be ordinary.

I dress normal because I want people to treat me regular. And their brains explode. It's really fun.