Quotes About Conformity

Do we trust the idea of love, no matter how mad – from Don Quixote's love for the farm girl he renames Dulcinea del Toboso to Yossarian's love for the chaplain – because in the face of conformity, the madder the love, in some mysterious way the greater the commitment to freedom?

you want to nudge people into socially desirable behavior, do not, by any means, let them know that their current actions are better than the social norm.

people have a strong tendency to go along with the status quo or default option.

Of course, coaches are Humans. They tend to do things the way they have always been done, because those decisions will not be second-guessed by the boss. As Keynes noted, following the conventional wisdom keeps you from getting fired.

People are sheep, Ringil raged. Moronic fucking sheep.

That's how you fight wars, after all—with soldiers who are more afraid of stepping out of line than they are of dying on the battlefield.

Siempre habrá imbéciles como esos, tragándose dogmas enteros para no tener que pensar por sí mismos.

For me, writing is like a good pair of pajamas -- comfortable. In our culture, writing is more often costumed up in a military outfit. We want our sentences to march in neat little rows, like well-behaved boarding-school children.

Cómo iban a poder si su propio hábito de beber es algo a lo que quieren aferrarse? «Saber lo que prefieres, en lugar de decir sumisamente "amén" a lo que el mundo te dice que debieras preferir, significa que has mantenido tu alma con vida».

I admired the English immensely for all that they had endured, and they were certainly honorable, and stopped their cars for pedestrians, and called you "sir" and "madam," and so on. But after a week there, I began to feel wild. It was those ruddy English faces, so held in by duty, the sense of "what is done" and "what is not done," and always swigging tea and chirping, that made me want to scream like a hyena

Men are sheep. Where one goes, the rest will soon follow. -Lady Whistledown

One of the first things she asked me was why I wore my watch on the inside of my wrist. I couldn't justify it, so I turned the face round, and put time on the outside, as normal, grown-up people did.

Freedom consists of conforming to the will of the majority.

My memories will be erased and then I'll be force-fed the story from the society pages?

Was it their face, in fact, for which they were guilty? Did it fail to please in some way? Worse yet, did it offend? IN

In the meantime, I hope you will not consign her to a windowless environment populated entirely by unsocialized clones who long ago abandoned the reading and discussion of literature in favor of creating ever more restrictive and meaningless ways in which humans are intended to make themselves known to one another.

deseaba tomar una esposa y vivir como un hombre normal... no para engañar a otros, sino para engañarse a sí mismo, convencerse de que no era diferente en modo alguno de otros hombres.

In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways. Indeed, originality is recognized as disobedience, pathology, incorrigible character and/or unlawful conduct to be prosecuted by the state.

Instead of sniping at her like Mrs. Mi, Mrs. Ting let my mother do all sorts of things she wanted, like reading novels: before, reading a book without a Marxist cover would bring down a rain of criticism about being a bourgeois intellectual.

There were no state regulations about hairstyles or clothes. It was what everyone else was wearing that determined the rules of the day. And because the range was so narrow, people were always looking out for the tiniest variations. It was a real test of ingenuity to look different and attractive, and yet similar enough to everyone else so that nobody with an accusing finger could pinpoint what exactly was heretical.

I wonder whether the nation itself is not an enormous mask intolerant of the rivalry of individual masks.

If I were just in trousers, somehow I could go out into the world. It would make no difference whether I was naked from the waist up and my feet bare just as long as I had trousers on. Otherwise if you go walking around the streets without trousers, no matter how new your shoes and how elegant your coat, it's enough to raise a big hue and cry. Enlightened society is a kind of trouser society.

Moneypenny was the brainy female character. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: smart or pretty. I had long resigned myself to category one, and as long as it got me to Harvard, I was happy. Except, it hadn't gotten me to Harvard. Clearly, it was time to switch to category two.

Every inch of me had been cut, filed, steamed, exfoliated, polished, painted, or moisturized. I didn't look a thing like Opal Mehta. Opal Mehta didn't own five pairs of shoes so expensive they could have been traded in for a small sailboat. She didn't wear makeup or Manolo Blahniks or Chanel sunglasses or Habitual jeans or La Perla bras. She never owned enough cashmere to make her concerned for the future of the Kazakhstani mountain goat population. I was turning into someone else.