Quotes About Conformity

People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe, organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become. With the whole world property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and registered and adressed and recorded. Nobody had left much room for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy. [...] The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom.

Brandy says, Don't you see? Because we're so trained to do life the right way. To not make mistakes. Brandy says, I figure, the bigger the mistake looks, the better chance I'll have to break out and live a real life.

You are the all-singing all-dancing crap of the world

dying seems like the greatest weakness, and in a world where people say you're lazy for not shaving your legs, then being dead seems like the ultimate character flaw. Chapter I.

I want out of the labels. I don't want my whole life crammed into a single word.

The most boring thing in the entire world, Brandy says, is nudity. The second most boring thing, she says, is honesty.

With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.

You realize that people take drugs because it's the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world. It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.

The same way a compact disk isn't responsible for what's recorded on it, that's how we are. You're about as free to act as a programmed computer. You're about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar bill

Fuck me. I'm so tired of being me. Me beautiful. Me ugly. Blonde. Brunette. A million fucking fashion makeovers that only leave me trapped being me.

I don't ex­pect you to un­der­stand," Adam says. "You're still the eight-?year-?old sit­ting in school, sit­ting in church, be­liev­ing ev­ery­thing you're told. You re­mem­ber pic­tures in books. They planned how you'd live your whole life. You're still asleep.

People in the outside world said something stupid with their every breath, and when they didn't talk their radios filled the gap with the copied voices of people singing the same songs over and over.

This makeover would make piercings and tattoos and brandings look so lame, all those little fashion revolts so safe that they themselves only become fashionable. Those little paper tiger attempts to reject looking good that only end up reinforcing it.

Brandy says, "Don't you see? Because we're so trained to do life the right way. To not make mistakes." Brandy says, "I figure, the bigger the mistake looks, the better chance I'll have to break out and live a real life.

The first week I was here, a girl got canned for humming an Erasure song while she was churning butter. It's like, yeah, Erasure is historic, but not historic enough.

Brandy says, "The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don't be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger." She says, "Don't do what you want." She says, "Do what you don't want. Do what you're trained not to want." It's the opposite of following your bliss. Brandy tells me, "Do the things that scare you the most.

The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or art director says. Like Tyler says, even a souffle looks pumped.

As if she ought to know better than to scream and bleed in public.

We are God's middle children, according to Tyler Durden, with no special place in history and no special attention.

I am the all-singing, all-dancing crap of this world," the space monkey tells the mirror. I am the toxic waste by-product of God's creation.

But I don't want to go back. Not yet. Just because. Because every once in a while, somebody brings me my lunch tray and my meds and he has a black eye or his forehead is swollen with stitches, and he says: We miss you Mr. Durden. Or somebody with a broken nose pushes a mop past me and whispers: Everything's going according to the plan. Whispers We're going to break up civilization so we can make something better out of the world. Whispers We look forward to getting you back.

She'd exchanged her dreams of her parents for the dogma of her instructors, but neither of those outlooks were innately her own.

Civilization is a condition which unsocial misfits impose on the rest of popular, easygoing, family-oriented humanity.

Sticking feathers up your butt," Tyler says, does not make you a chicken.