Quotes About Conformity

This was all part of the American Dream. Get a checkup once a year. Get blood tests. Live your life. But protect yourself. Don't step out of the box. Take care of yourself. Life is hard. But then life is easy if you follow the rules.

Every time I refused to believe in and act on the American Dream, I was punished severely. Because everyone else has invested so much of their money and lives in this dream that it freaks them out when other people deviate—let alone take a detour, or be happier.

The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.

People make you pay for the way you look, which is also the way you think you look, and what time writes is a record of that collision.

the key to illusion is complicity. The world sees what it wishes to see: it does not wish to see who, or what, or why you are.

They were so free that they believed in nothing; and didn't realize that this illusion was their only truth and that they were doing exactly as they had been told.

There they stood, in twos and threes and fours, in their Cub Scout uniforms and with their Cub Scout faces, totally unprepared, as is the way with American he-men, for anything that could not be settled with a club or a fist or a gun.

The life you think you should want,' said Eric, 'is always the life that looks safest.

It is part of the price the Negro pays for his position in this society that, as Richard Wright points out, he is almost always acting. A Negro learns to gauge precisely what reaction the alien person facing him desires, and he produces it with disarming artlessness. The friends I had, growing up and going to work, grew more bitter every day; and, conversely, they learned to hide this bitterness and to fit into the pattern Gentile and Jew alike had fixed for them.

But the policemen were doing nothing now. Obviously, this was not because they had become more human but because they were under orders and because they were afraid. And indeed they were, and I was delighted to see it. There they stood, in twos and threes and fours, in their Cub Scout uniforms and with their Cub Scout faces, totally unprepared, as is the way with American he-men, for anything that could not be settled with a club or a fist or a gun.

It is very nearly impossible . . . to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind. --"They Can't Turn Back," in Mademoiselle (New York, Aug. 1960; repr. in The Price of the Ticket, 1985)     The

a child's major attention has to be concentrated on how to fit into a world which, with every passing hour, reveals itself as merciless.

Zygmunt Bauman, "Living Without an Alternative

Default choices often remain unchanged for no reason other than being the default, either because of this lack of information or humans' status quo bias.

Pirate was going to be my middle name, but then my uncle had a problem with it because pirates are bad.

I would be very uncomfortable doing a safe part. It would make me think something is wrong.

After having the sex change, it was about getting married and fitting in and blending into society, so to speak. When I had jobs, people would say, 'Don't talk about that.' It really made people uncomfortable.

Following a trend too closely is a risky thing. If not properly executed, you could easily end up looking uncomfortable, over-styled, and downright foolish.

Any eyes on me - a late-night street sweeper, some dude texting in his parked car, the homeless guy talking to himself - make me feel uncomfortable when I skate. Everyone expects me to do certain things.

Familiarity is all the rage. And if you're doing something that doesn't have its rhythms preset, you know, everybody's a little bit uncomfortable.

I had to constantly try and fit in it and it really exhausted and tired me. I don't regret it because that was my learning to learn to come to this point of loving myself unconditionally.

I am an unconventional beauty. I grew up in a high school where if you didn't have a nose job and money and if you weren't thin, you weren't cool, popular, beautiful. I was always told that I wasn't pretty enough to be on television.

I'm unconventional and eccentric and talk things out, and it seemed that the person I married - maybe in reaction - got quieter and more conventional over time. It felt as if we were putting each other in a straitjacket.

Literary dementia seems dated now, but there was a time when a month in the funny farm was as de rigueur for budding writers as an M.F.A. is now. To be sent away was a badge of honor; to undergo electroshock, a glorious martyrdom.