Quotes About Conformity

It's not as if he's had much of a chance until now, but somehow he has internalized the ur-cultural narrative: you grow up, go to university, get a job, meet Ms. Right, get married, settle down, have kids, grow old together . . . it's like some sort of checklist. Or maybe a list of epic quests you've got to complete while level-grinding in a game you're not allowed to quit, with no respawns and no cheat codes.

the seeds of evil usually germinated in the footprints of people who knew how everybody else ought to behave and felt the need to tell them so.

The most efficient kind of censorship isn't the heavy-handed black inking of the secret policeman; it's the self-censorship we impose on ourselves when we're afraid that if we say what we think everyone around us will think us strange.

Very strong imagery of conformity versus mold-breaking, concealing conformity disguised as mold-breaking. Ever wondered why Mac users are so glassy-eyed about their boxes?

Compliance with the mile-high stack of social expectations you grow up with as a girl turns out to be mandatory if you want to get ahead in business. Be blonde, be skinny, and don't forget to smile, bitch.

103When we try to be something that we are not, we become the slave of a rigid, fixed mind, following a rule about how things have to be. The violence and the anger in us remain unnoticed, because we are caught in our pictures of how we should be.

Orthodoxy whether of the right or of the left is the graveyard of creativity.

The governing ideal was not merely to keep up with the Joneses, but to be the Joneses—to own the same model of car or dishwasher or lawn mower.

Then television took over, birthing the ultimate in lockstep culture.

It is important for us to realize that emphasis on conformity and the fear of spontaneous living can have an effect almost as devastating as the totalitarian's deliberate assault on the mind . . . . Trained into conformity the child may well grow up into an adult who welcomes with relief the authoritarian demands of a totalitarian leader. It is the welcome repetition of an old pattern that can be followed without investment of a new emotional energy.14

If you want to fit in, you try to mirror whatever anyone wants from you.

The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

In order to be Miss Anybody you had to have excellent grades, and I had terrible grades because of my dyslexia.

Many art-worlders have an if-you-say-so approach to art: Everyone is so scared of missing out on the next hot artist that it's never clear whether people are liking work because they like it or because other people do. Everyone is keeping up with the Joneses, and there are more Joneses than ever.

I don't think I fit the Marilyn Maxwell mode.

He who fears to be out of the mode does not deserve to belong to himself.

It's easy to think you have to fit some kind of mold.

In television, what you are doing is trying to fit your voice into a particular mold.

It was me that was holding myself back because I felt like I had to fit into this mold of what people want to see.

My mom wouldn't let me buy clothes she didn't like, so I dressed like a middle-aged woman in high school.

It's an important point to make that people can't just be invalidated, eradicated, because they don't fit tidily into a box. And more and more, the modern world is all about conformity.

I want to avoid becoming too styled, too 'done' and too generic. You see people as they go through their career, and they just become more and more like everyone else. They start out with something individual about them, but it gets lost.

I'm no more or less antisocial than the next person.

I was mortified by my parents - what they did, who they were, everything. I hated who I was. I hated everything, and I would live in a fantasy world and try to be different. But that's not a lot different, I think, than a lot of kids.