Quotes About Conformity

Verrücktheiten können ganz normal sein, solange man sie selbst tut; beobachtet man einen anderen dabei, rümpft man die Nase, dreht sich rasch um und geht davon.

That is all you can think of: what people will say! One goes from one end of the world to the other to hear the same story. Does it matter what people say?

Sweet? Submissive? May as well be a housewife Ã¢â'¬Â¦ it dims my luster, makes me resemble others—that's the worst thing that could happen.

I dislike being held to a set of rules for no reason other than to create the impression of order, whether it exists or not.

A perfectly normal person is rare in our civilization.

Apparently, all you needed to be considered normal was no evidence to the contrary.

In the feudal fiefdom of school, rank was determined early. You could change your hair and clothes. You could, having learned your lesson, not write a paper on Julius Caesar entirely in iambic pentameter or you could not tell anyone if you did. You could switch to contact lenses, compensate for your braininess by not doing your homework. Every boy in school could grow twelve inches. The sun could go fucking nova. And you'd still be the same grotesque you'd always been.

The monsters don't run the gulags and the death camps and the reeducation centers. Regular people do. If they all had the balls to say no, the likes of Halsey, Zhou, or Stalin could never do it all on their own. Could they?

think what you like, hate who you like, because that's between you and God, but you will act as the community requires, or the community will no longer require you.

I tell you this: think what you like, hate who you like, because that's between you and God, but you will act as the community requires, or the community will no longer require you.

Used to be, only bikers and outlaws had tattoos. They were so commonplace now that they weren't even a statement. Unless the statement was, "Look, I'm like everybody else." Her

He had never brought home a school report and watched his mother smile. The clay ashtray he'd made in kindergarten had been one of sixteen Mrs. Flannigan received on Mother's Day. All the Christmas gifts under the tree were labeled "for a girl" or "for a boy." The evening Will graduated high school, he'd looked out at the crowd of cheering families and seen only strangers.

It was getting to be so ridiculous, she was surprised there weren't special schools for the boring, average children.

Claire didn't argue because Lydia was older and she always got to drive. She opened the mudroom door and left it unlocked. At this point, Claire welcomed the burglars to return. She would've left cookies out for them if she'd had the time.

buy her entry into normal society, but she hadn't realized what that society was like.

If you throw money out of the window throw it out with joy. Don't say: 'one shouldn't do that' - that is bourgeois.

I've heard goldfish grow to the size of their surroundings; so does furniture.

In my marriages, I'd lost parts of who I was because I was trying to mold myself into what I thought a man wanted me to be.

You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind-legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men.

I find no quality so easy for a man to counterfeit as devotion, though his life and manner are not conformable to it; the essence of it is abstruse and occult, but the appearances easy and showy.

Men walk almost always in the paths trodden by others, proceeding in their actions by imitation.

In great matters, men behave as they are expected to; in little ones, as they would naturally

The great majority of men grow up and grow old in seeming and following.

Man's unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between the desire to stand out and the need to blend in.