Quotes About Conformity

The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible.  What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.

There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one's fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live, undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet.

Jack? . . . No, there is very little music in the name Jack, if any at all, indeed. It does not thrill. It produces absolutely no vibrations . . . I have known several Jacks, and they all, without exception, were more than usually plain. Besides, Jack is a notorious domesticity for John! And I pity any woman who is married to a man called John. She would probably never be allowed to know the entrancing pleasure of a single moment's solitude. The only really safe name is Ernest.

It is tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man,' says Emerson, 'than an act of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

As the water shapes itself to the vessel that contains it, so a wise man adapts himself to circumstances.

Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy'?

Real trouble doesn't begin in a society until boredom has become its most general feature. Boredom will drive even quietminded people down paths they never imagined.

It may even be that everybody starts out fairly unique only most people get over it.

But of course what really threatens the scofflaw is not the just society but the decaying one. It is here that he finds himself becoming slowly indistinguishable from the citizenry.

It may even be that everybody starts out fairly unique only most people get over it. Come

For far too long she'd made herself small, made herself fit into their world.

Was waren sie doch alle für Schauspieler! Alle, wie sie dastanden. Aber was spielten sie? Das, was die anderen sehen wollten? Das, was sie selbst gern sein wollten?

Men liked to claim how different they were, yet they were all so alike.

The law didn't care if you were actually doing anything bad; they were willing to put you under the microscope just for being statistically abnormal.

No one at the Interior Ministry used PGP for email, because no normal human does

Sometimes when I speak, I feel like I'm writing dialogue for the character of myself. I'm impersonating a normal human when really I'm a confused freak.

Curtis Sittenfeld

Either Ault was a lot harder than my junior high had been, or I was getting dumber- I suspected both. If I wasn't literally getting dumber, I knew at least that I'd lost the glow that surrounds you when the teachers think you're one of the smart, responsible ones, that glow that shines brighter every time you raise your hand in class to say the perfect thing, or you run out of room in a blue book during an exam and have to ask for a second one.

There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.

Any inhibition must be wrong, since inevitably in the end it causes neurosis and insanity.

Tão sensíveis que nós somos àquilo que se espera de nós.

I sense a learning: that much dumber people than you end up in charge. Look at the way things are. I'm no fucken genius or anything, but these spazzos are in charge of my every twitch. What I'm starting to think is maybe only the dumb are safe in this world, the ones who roam with the herd, without thinking about every little thing. But see me? I have to think about every little fucken thing.

She was nobody, there was no reality in herself, the reality was all outside of her, and she must apply herself to it.

The final fact being that at the very bottom of his soul he was an outsider, and anti-social, and he accepted the fact inwardly, no matter how Bond-Streety he was on the outside. His isolation was a necessity to him; just as the appearance of conformity and mixing-in with the smart people was also a necessity.