Quotes About Conformity

In this dirty-minded world," Jenny thinks, "you are either somebody's wife or somebody's whore—or fast on your way to becoming one or the other. If you don't fit either category, then everyone tries to make you think there is something wrong with you.

That's why I hate them. They force you to be like them—or else you're their enemy.

We had never had a pet—my grandmother thought that people who kept pets were engaged in the basest form of self-mockery, intentionally putting themselves on a level with animals.

I'm not an anti-feminist! Of course you're not, Garp told her. They make everything so black and white. Of course they do, said Garp. That's why I hate them. They force you to be like them - or else you're their enemy. Yes, yes, Garp said. I wish I could talk.

In this dirty-minded world, she thought, you are either somebody's wife or somebody's whore—or fast on your way to becoming one or the other. If you don't fit either category, then everyone tries to make you think there is something wrong with you.

But some rules are just rules. You just got to break them carefully.

The classes they taught were for no student's special development; their interests were the subject themselves—their passions were for the politics of the university, or of their own departments within it—and their overall view of us students was that we should conform ourselves to their methods of their disciplines of study.

It might be more accurate to think of love as a feeling we have for others who match up with what society teaches us to want in a mate.

Anyone who threatens the status quo, no matter how humane and sensible the reason, is usually accused of being a radical of the most extreme sort.

Even while you read this, whole square miles of identical boxes are spreading like gangrene; developments conceived in error, nurtured by greed, corroding everything they touch.

Like a bitch in heat, I seem to attract a coterie of policemen and sanitation officials. The world will someday get me on some ludicrous pretext; I simply await the day that they drag me to some air-conditioned dungeon and leave me there beneath the fluorescent lights and soundproofed ceiling to pay the price for scorning all that they hold dear within their little latex hearts.

They would try to make me into a moron who liked television and new cars and frozen food. Don't you understand? Psychiatry is worse than communism. I refuse to be brainwashed. I won't be a robot!

The only problem that those people have anyway is that they don't like new cars and hair sprays. That's why they are put away. They make the other members of the society fearful. Every asylum in this nation is filled with poor souls who simply cannot stand lanolin, cellophane, plastic, television, and subdivisions.

In other words, you want to become totally bourgeois. You people have all been brainwashed. I imagine that you'd like to become a success or something equally vile.

Clean, hard-working, dependable, quiet type.' Good God! What kind of monster is this that they want. I am afraid that I could never work for a concern with a worldview like that.

Oh, my God! Ignatius mumbled, looking at the austere little calling card. You can't really be named Dorian Greene. Yes, isn't that wild? Dorian asked languidly. If I told you my real name, you'd never speak to me again. It's so common I could die just thinking of it. I was born on a wheat farm in Nebraska. You can take it from there.

the tight trousers that bulged offensively in the crotch in violation of all rules of theology and geometry.

The outfit was acceptable by any theological and geometrical standards, however abstruse, and suggested a rich inner life.

It was partly his doing. The Devon faculty had never before experienced a student who combined a calm ignorance of the rules with a winning urge to be good, who seemed to love the school truly and deeply, and never more than when he was breaking the regulations, a model boy who was most comfortable in the truant's corner. The faculty threw up its hands over Phineas, and so loosened its grip on all of us.

There isn't any question that we are conforming in every possible way to everything that's happening and everything that's going to happen.

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not common.

We are like chameleons, we take our hue and the color of our moral character, from those who are around us.

It's a repressive society where you can't be horrible, I'm not horrible, they made me horrible, I'm just honest.