Quotes About Conformity

Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy

At the very beginning, anticipatory obedience means adapting instinctively, without reflecting, to a new situation.

Do not obey in advance.

The anticipatory obedience of Austrians in March 1938 taught the high Nazi leadership what was possible.

Milgram grasped that people are remarkably receptive to new rules in a new setting. They are surprisingly willing to harm and kill others in the service of some new purpose if they are so instructed by a new authority.

Some killed from murderous conviction. But many others who killed were just afraid to stand out. other forces were at work besides conformism. But without conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible.

Ionesco's aim was to help us see just how bizarre propaganda actually is, but how normal it seems to those who yield to it. By using the absurd image of the rhinoceros, Ionesco was trying to shock people into noticing the strangeness of what was actually happening.

Milgram grasped that people are remarkably receptive to new rules in a new setting. They are surprisingly willing to harm and kill others in the service of some new purpose if they are so instructed by a new authority. "I

When everyone else follows the same logic, the public sphere is covered with signs of loyalty, and resistance becomes unthinkable.

Because enough people in both cases voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed. In

people are remarkably receptive to new rules in a new setting. They are surprisingly willing to harm and kill others in the service of some new purpose if they are so instructed by a new authority.

T]he majority possesses an empire so absolute and so irresistible that one must in a way renounce one's rights as a citizen and so to speak one's quality as a man when one wants to deviate from the path it has traced.

The narcissism of small differences leads to the most boring kind of conformity.

Identity is how I want others to see me and thus always involves a capitulation to one form of social authority or another. Despite the feeling that we really are this identity, it is not the product of our freedom. It is a capitulation to the dictates of the social order. We do not make ourselves who we are, but social and natural determinations structure our identity.

Capitalism engenders identity politics. It does so by stripping away the content of all particular identity by imposing the commodity form on every particularity. This commodity form is not a universal but an empty form that necessitates total conformity.

It was the people who tried to seem normal all the time who were really messed up

It condemned The Wave as a dangerous and mindless movement that suppressed freedom of speech and thought and ran against everything the country was founded on.

I defied nothing at all. I ignored the law because I didn't know it existed. It didn't occur to me that anyone would want to curb my inspiration.

When you are different, that can lead to judges not marking you right because they think you look 'odd' - and that's in any competition.

As a kid I was very conscious of trying to be functional and not be too odd.

I think trying to be offbeat is the most boring thing possible.

Long hair is an unpardonable offence which should be punishable by death.

I don't mean to offend anybody, but I think that we get a lot of scientists now who are bent into a system, and we lose some of their boldness by that. Obviously, you have to learn the ropes, but I think it's important to do that without hammering out the radicalness that makes innovation happen.

Far too many of our elected officials are chained to an ideology that is rooted in the past. They are keepers of normalcy who embrace things as they've always been.