Quotes About Conformity

When you have lived your life under such dominant image-leadership, its pressures put a certain invisible English on the cue ball of your development: It influences all of your ideas about who you should be, all the ways in which you become yourself.

Give your oppressed masses a sense of virtue accumulated through suffering, and stand back and marvel as they censor themselves and act in a decent, God-fearing, law-abiding and—best of all—long-suffering manner, in order to feel ethically superior to you. I've

I want to make a difference. But get a job? I worry that will make the ordinary, like everybody else.

My everyday Appleton life, my phones calls to my father, my occasional beers with friends, my Saturday-morning jobs around the reservoir - what was all that, but the opiated husk of a life, the treadmill of the ordinary, a cage built of convention and consumerism and obligation and fear, in which I'd lolled for decades, oblivious, like a lotus eater, as my body aged and time advanced?

The guy I'm thinking of doesn't really look like me-not exactly. It's more that he looks like…like everyone…and no one…all at the same time. It's as if he let go of his true self…so he could play any part…be whomever someone else most desired him to be. I don't see how that could make anyone very happy.

Men died for that approval, sacrificed for that approval, lived lives they loathed for that approval. For without it a man was on his own, an outcast, an animal that had been driven from the pack.

The rich and powerful like to appear conformist, God-fearing, vaguely naïve and permanently jolly because they are none of those things.

El maquillaje puede ser una falsedad, pero no si todo el mundo lo lleva. Si todo el mundo va maquillado, el maquillaje se convierte en en la manera en que son las cosas. Y que es la verdad sino la manera en que son las cosas?

Once established, the young girl's dependency is systematically supported as she proceeds through childhood. For being nice - nonchallenging, nonconfronting, noncomplaining - she's rewarded with good grades, the approval of her parents and teachers, and the affection of her peers. What reason is there for her to turn deviant or nonconformist? The going is good, so she conforms. Increasingly, she patterns herself after what's expected of her.

Oh. Really? Smith? The most common, boring name in the world? - Evaline, to Pix

That he had outwitted Nickel because he got along and kept out of trouble. In fact he had been ruined. He was like one of those Negroes Dr. King spoke of in his letter from jail, so complacent and sleepy after years of oppression that they h ad adjusted to it and learned to sleep in it as their only bed.

The white boys bruised differently than the black boys and called it the Ice Cream Factory because you came out with bruises of every color. The black boys called it the White House because that was its official name and it fit and didn't need to be embellished. The White House delivered the law and everybody obeyed.

During his term at Nickel, the Mexican boy sidestepped the squabbles that embroiled the rest of them, the uncounted disputes over psychological turf and endless encroachments. His constant dorm reassignments notwithstanding, Jaimie kept a quiet profile and conducted himself in accordance with the Nickel handbook's rules of conduct—a miracle, since no one had ever seen the handbook despite its constant invocations by the staff. Like justice, it existed in theory.

To preempt rejection she dresses to exaggerate her difference when the true enemy is not the world's disdain but its indifference. He is surely the next item in a dreary procession and cannot be seen for all those previous disappointments.

The worst burden in life is what others know about us. But maybe there is one burden even worse than this. It happens when they don't know about us, it is what they think about us when, in silence, they force us to be what they expect us to be. Even worse is how we become it and I, chonorroeja, have become it.

Middle school is for being like everyone else; middle age is for being like yourself. (430)

No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).

he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).

How is the existential vacuum to be explained? Unlike the animal, man is no longer told by his instincts as to what he must do. And in contrast to former times, he is no longer told by traditions and values what he should do. Now, knowing neither what he must do nor what he should do, he sometimes does not even know what it is that he basically wishes to do. Instead, he gets to wish to do what other people do (conformity) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).

Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).

Instead, either he wishes to do what other people do (conformism), or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).

It was, therefore, in an attempt to save one's own skin that one literally tried to submerge into the crowd.

Above all others, that was the lesson that had been beaten into her. Follow orders. You are nothing. A machine cog that either performs its function or is torn out and replaced.

As a twig is bent the tree inclines.