Quotes About Conformity

If you live the way others want you to, you are called a nice guy. If you live the way you want, you are called selfish.

Our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be.

My dear dad always tried to introduce me to children of his friends, but I just never took to them. Those were the people we were shoved with at school dances, usually Eton boys because it was the cleverest boys' school, and ours was supposed to be the cleverest girls' school.

We too often bind ourselves by authorities rather than by the truth.

I'm not out here trying putting on an act like I'm crazy. In my opinion, everyone else is crazy. They're the ones who put on an act for you, doing what they're told in front of the camera.

The outburst of sexual freedom in the '60s was bound to happen because the '50s were so oppressing. You had to live that way; women had to be like this - it was all locked into a false reality.

When I was in high school, there was no safe haven, there was no outlet for you to speak your mind.

I became the master of playing the straight bat - I would go to bars with the boys, I would always be the one to start a fight, to be outrageous and drink the most. I even went to the extreme of marrying the perfect woman for me.

Fashion has underscored the interchangeability of men for a long time, maybe from the outset.

Don't go outside the box when you're still not very good inside the box.

Why should anybody see our faces? What have our clothes got to do with anything? So we got the masks and the overalls, and we set about developing the most insane live shows that anyone has ever seen.

I overheard people saying, 'She thinks she's so great because she's Debbie Reynolds' daughter!' And I didn't like it; it made me different from other people, and I wanted to be the same.

The seat belt irked his father more than Uncle Colin's not eating meat, because, though his father never said it, Larry knew he considered seat belts cowardly.

That you feel something to be right may have its cause in your never having thought much about yourself and having blindly accepted what has been labelled right since your childhood.' —Friedrich Nietzsche

But how many chose to ignore the direct attack they laid on what is fed to all of us as 'life,' with its well-defined roads to factory and pool-hall, to work and pleasure, both organized, both shells, both a continuation of existence by forced means, in the shadow of life?

So long as a man appeared to be respectable he could do as he pleased.

The Alignment

So I'm smoking in the house, Mother said. And Bobbie's got a dog in her room. And your son Will's got an Injun in his. So there it is, Mother said. Like it or lump it!

The idea that all the people locked up in mental hospitals are sane while all the people walking about are mad is merely a literary cliche, put about by people who should be locked up. I assure you there is not much in it. Taken as a whole, the sane are out there the sick are in here. For example you are in here because you have delusions that sane people are put in mental hospitals.

This machine is driven in part by the oscillations of novelty and familiarity, of hunger and satiation, that curious internal psychophysical calculus that causes us to tire of food, music, the color orange. But it is also driven in part by the subtle movements of people trying to be like each other and people trying to be different from each other.

the hipster effect occurs, he suggests, when people try to make decisions in opposition to the majority. Because no one knows exactly what other people are going to do next, and information can be noisy or delayed, there can also be periods of brief "synchronization," in which nonconformists fail to be "disaligned with the majority.

We all want to be individuals on the road, but smooth-flowing traffic requires conformity. We want all the lights to be green, unless we are on the intersecting road, in which case we want those lights to be green. We want little traffic on our own street but a convenient ten-lane highway blazing just nearby. We all wish the other person would not drive, so that our trip would be faster. What's best for us on the road is often not best for everyone else, and vice versa.

Humor results when society says you can't scratch certain things in public, but they itch in public.

Are you suppose to wear swimming trunks when you are in the car pool lane?