Quotes About Conformity

Classical education has deformed everything, and has imposed upon us as geniuses men of correct, facile talent, who follow the beaten track.

If education tries to make other persons out of us than we essentially are, deeper inside, it stultifies, and reproach matters.

We already have so much pressure towards sameness through radio, film and comic outside the school, that we can't afford to do a thing inside that is not toward individual development.

I urge you to examine in your own mind the assumptions which must lay behind using the police power to insist that once-sovereign spirits have no choice but to submit to being schooled by strangers.

You might as well play at the show everyone else is playing at.

I don't like going to 155; I do it because everyone else does.

I don't want to change; I just want to be like everyone else. I'm nothing special.

I just want to be just as everyone else. I want to educate myself and be just like a normal teenager.

I was a player who was vying to do exactly what everyone else was doing, and I happened to be black.

I was afraid of not living up to what people expected me to be.

If my life choices had to be predicated based on what was expected of me from a community on either side, that's going to make me feel really straitjacketed, and I don't want to feel that.

I am pathetically law-abiding.

Growing up black, you are lied to and told to act in a way that isn't who you are.

A lot of times, our greatest minds are locked into a 9-5 job.

I'm from Long Island, which is a very cookie-cutter place.

The mainstream is always under attack.

Everyone is being told by society to talk this way, to dress that way, to be this person or to be that person, and it's so important to just maintain a sense of self.

Media seems to be obsessed with this idea of everybody marching to the same beat.

What makes you a real girl or boy is that no one laughs at you. If you are imitation or unreal, the rules give you a right to exist provided you do what the real ones or brutes say. What makes you into me or Charles Morgan is that the rules allow all the girls to be better than me and all the boys better than Charles Morgan.

What's the good of being civilized, that's what I'd like to know? It just means other people can break the rules and you can't.

Sometimes, the most brilliant and intelligent minds do not shine in standardized tests because they do not have standardized minds.

Shoes are like people. They adjust to situations.

We learn nothing from the stereotypes around us, not even that we're all the same.

She saw the normative life of the planet, business people crossing streets beneath glass towers, the life of sitting on buses that take you logically to destinations, the unnerved surface of rolling plausibly along.