Quotes About Conformity

My friend and I sang an a cappella rendition of Extreme's 'More Than Words' at one of our football pep rallies in a desperate attempt to look cool. For a while, I wore pink Converse All Stars because I thought it made me seem daring and irreverent.

Because of both hipster culture and Facebook culture, the human race is starting to resemble a school of hairy piranhas.

When I was starting out, I followed along the path that seemed to be marked out for me - from high school to college to law school to professional life.

But for everyone, I think, there is always a pressure to conform, and I guess as you get older you realize it's less interesting to do that. It starts with you, though, saying, 'I know what I like doing and that's what I'm going to do.'

I try not to name too many labels - not because it's not cool, but because it starts getting political.

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

If I'm shopping at the Gap or Old Navy, I'm saying that I'm an ordinary person: I don't want to be seen; I don't want to stand out. That's a statement. If I'm wearing a leather jacket, there's something about me that's kind of a rebel. So everybody says something, whether they want to or not.

I absolutely think it is more acceptable for people who were assigned female at birth to dress in a typically gender non-conforming way. There was a time when people of all genders had long hair and anyone who wanted to wore jewelry - it was more a sign of status than a sign of femininity, per se.

Being quiet is comfortable. Keeping things the way they've been is comfortable. And all comfort has done is maintain the status quo.

Status quo just means that everyone's doing it. It doesn't mean that this was divinely ordained, and of course this is the right decision.

I would say any behavior that is not the status quo is interpreted as insanity, when, in fact, it might actually be enlightenment. Insanity is sorta in the eye of the beholder.

I really think it would be cowardly to pull back and not challenge the status quo, when the status quo may not be the right way for the field to go.

People are scared to speak out against the status quo: their jobs and livelihoods, they believe, are at risk.

I began tailoring my books to cater to one or another universe of readers. I found it incredibly boring; and frankly, it felt stultifying. I'd previously been in advertising. I felt if I was going to create something to fit a specific market, I might as well have stayed with advertising.

I didn't play any extreme sports growing up. I never surfed, and I grew up in Santa Cruz. I was very good at doing what I was told, taking direction, and staying middle of the road. I mean, they called me 'grandma' in college.

Everyone goes to the same exhibitions and the same parties, stays in the same handful of hotels, eats at the same no-star restaurants, and has almost the same opinions. I adore the art world, but this is copycat behavior in a sphere that prides itself on independent thinking.

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.

I remember I had to have steel toecaps because my nana said, 'They'll last,' and I remember being bullied because my shoes weren't like anyone else's. Everyone had Kickers.

It's good to step out of the box, but don't step out so far that you can't get back in.

L.A. is... I always feel sort of abducted when I'm there, like I've stepped onto another planet where everyone looks the same.

Do as most do, and men will speak well of you.

Chapter 7 takes a psychological truism, "we tend to believe what we think others believe" and turns it around: We tend to think others believe what we believe. This chapter examines a set of cognitive, social, and motivational processes that prompt us to overestimate the extent to which others share our beliefs, further bolstering our credulity.

Because so much disagreement remains hidden, our beliefs are not properly shaped by healthy scrutiny and debate. The absence of such argument also leads us to exaggerate the extent to which other people believe the way we do.

I do not say think as I think, but think in my way. Fear no shadows, least of all in that great spectre of personal unhappiness which binds half the world to orthodoxy.