Quotes About Conformity

I'm worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel - let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they're doing. I'm concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that's handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers.

Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.

The great challenge which faces us is to assure that, in our society of big-ness, we do not strangle the voice of creativity, that the rules of the game do not come to overshadow its purpose, that the grand orchestration of society leaves ample room for the man who marches to the music of another drummer.

Society is based on the assumption that everyone is alike and no one is alive.

I had to wonder how Ginny could hold her head up under the weight of cosmetics smeared all over her face. Underneath it all, she may have been quite pretty. Or she may have been Dirk Bogarde. I will never know.

The price of being a sheep is boredom. The price of being a wolf is loneliness. Choose one or the other with great care.

The genius of stable societies is that they achieve stability without stagnation, repetition without monotony, conformity with originality, obedience with liberty.

If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up.

If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up.

I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.

People look at you a certain way and somehow you wind up being that way.

In so much of politics you're not allowed to disagree with what's been agreed.

Unfortunately, many people sleepwalk through life without conscious awareness of their own system, if they have one at all, and are therefore susceptible to external notions o right and wrong imposed by others, particlarly members of the ofen eminently unqualified upper class and their support system, mass media.

William Shirer, witnessing the scene, the 600 Reichstag deputies, 'little men with big bodies and bulging necks and cropped hair and pouched bellies and brown uniforms and heavy boots, little men of clay in his fine hands, leap to their feet like automatons, their right arms upstretched in the Nazi salute, and scream "Heil's".

It wasn't enough. Not anymore. There had to be more to life than being put in the job that was most satisfying for you, living in the home that made you most comfortable, visiting the friends with whom you never fell out because it was impossible to disagree with them, marrying the partner who was totally compatible with you in every way, being happy in everything because happiness was compulsory. …

Everyone, it seemed to him, lived their lives out of little boxes, opening different ones for different occasions. Nobody ever gave their whole self away. Cops were like that, each box a safety mechanism. Most people you met in the course of your life, you never even learned their names. Everybody was boxed off from everybody else. It was called society.

Man is a child of the customs and the things he has become used to. He is not the product of his natural disposition and temperament. The conditions to which he has become accustomed, until they have become for him a quality of character and matters of habit and custom, have replaced his natural disposition.

In a village where everyone has only one leg, the biped will hop about more lamely than anyone else, if he knows what is good for him.

among roses, be a rose, among thorns, be a thorn

Eat what you desire, but dress like other people.

When you get a principle on which everyone is agreed, you get the beginning of complacency and deterioration.

Come lo que desees, pero vístete como el resto.

Cuando tienes un principio con el que están todos de acuerdo, obtienes lo que es el comienzo de la complacencia y el deterioro.

I was who I was in high school in accordance with the rules of conduct for a normal person, like obeying your mom and dad. Then I got out of high school and moved out of the house, and I just started, for lack of a better term, running free.