Quotes About Conformity

During my first several days there I really did feel like a fish out of water. After years of following a military dress code I wasn't even sure what to wear. The one place I felt like I fit in was out on a boat and, fortunately, trials for the freshman sailing team began right away.

The lesson was clear and I learned it well: blind acquiescence was necessary to gain approval; being yourself only earned condemnation.

Looking back, I realized that we were being raised to be schizophrenic; an appearance of perfection was more important than genuine feelings

I obeyed, but my crime was that I did not look obedient.

When holiness is achieved by conforming to God's will, one knows intuitively that which is wrong and that which is right before the Lord. Holiness speaks when there is silence, encouraging that which is good or reproving that which is wrong.

We're raised to believe that black men have to be one specific way.

Mainstream cinema raises questions only to immediately provide an answer to them, so they can send the spectator home reassured. If we actually had those answers, then society would appear very different from what it is.

I was just trying to fit into a certain spectrum. Just like, basic rap.

Seeking approval and people pleasing forces you to alter your actions and speech to no longer reflect what you actually think or feel.

Some people still believe you should just fall in line with what's going on - and that's scary. It makes a mockery of freedom of speech.

In communism, we never had any freedom - of movement, of speech, of press. We didn't even make own decisions for our lives, our future. We were human robots.

Everyone told me to pass on 'Speed' because it was a 'bus movie.'

As a kid, I spent a lot of my mental energy hiding who I was and attempting to fit in.

We are too quick to put labels on things. It is my profession. I get up and paint. Everyone wants to put a label on it, but I am a free spirit, so I fight against that.

Surefire things are deadening to the human spirit.

We will follow in letter and spirit whatever the RBI rules and guidelines are - whether at the holding company level or individual company level.

It was a place that is trying to destroy the individual by every means possible; trying to break his spirit, so that he accepts that he is No. 6 and will live there happily as No. 6 for ever after. And this is the one rebel that they can't break.

Most people I knew had been crippled by their educations. Some were even dying spiritually.

Saudi had been a very restricted place. Even on the magazines there, if there was a little leg or cleavage showing, they used to blacken it with a black mark. Me and Ishmeet, so many times, had tried to remove the black portion with our spit, but of course, it would never come out.

As women, we get the message about how to be a good girl - how to be a good, pretty girl - from such an early age. Then, at the same time, we're told that well-behaved girls won't change the world or ever make a splash.

I got all A's and was hated for it; I spoke correctly and was called a punk.

Middle and high school is a time of people telling you who you are before you know who you are. I was in advanced classes at Frick and Schenley, and people would say I was trying to be white because of the way I spoke. Or they'd say I was gay.

Eccentricity, to be socially acceptable, had still to have at least four or five generations of inbreeding behind it.

So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.