Quotes About Conformity

Suzuki Roshi once said to his Sixties American students that the way they dressed- with beads, long hair, brightly colored clothes-they all looked alike. Shave your heads, wear black robes, he said- Ah, now I can see your uniqueness. Our ideas and intentions can mask and cover up a story; there is a life force that will declare itself if you let it. Get out of the way.

People may believe that there can be a society where dissent is not permitted, but which is nonetheless not a fear society because everyone agrees with one another and therefore no one wants to dissent.

Most of us were "socialized" by well-meaning teachers, coaches, and other authority figures who encouraged us to find our place in the world and comfortably fit in rather than build the self-confidence that would help us stand out.

You know, in the Soviet Union they used to have a tradition of ordering scientists to change their studies to conform with the ideology then acceptable to the state. And scientists in the rest of the world found that laughable as well as tragic.

I'm so rude. 'If you have trouble with anything...' I don't deserve to have anyone say that to me! 'When you need help, ask for help!' If I asked for help, I would just be...spoiled. Because I haven't done anything yet. I haven't done a single thing. By myself... or starting with myself...I've always just gone with the flow.

We cannot improve the world if we are conformed to the world.

Broadly speaking, most people lived their lives in a kind of unwilling conformity. The thing was that they were offered, as time went by, various kinds of freedom, most of which were sort of dummy freedoms somehow.

When we start putting together systems to make sure that future generations obey, what we end up doing is building an institution that conforms people to a pattern. They don't have their own faith, they're living off the residue of faith of a previous generation.

It is quite probable that the most original problem solving activity students engage in school is related to the invention of systems for beating the system.

Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

I try not to name too many labels - not because it's not cool, but because it starts getting political.

You can take anyone and represent him to yourself as the man (or woman) you would like him to be and, if you do not waver in that representation, he will conform to it.

It was as though they had so saturated themselves with professional behaviourism that they had lost the knack of being natural.

When you're different you've got two choices. You can stand out or you step back.

I guess I just struggle with belonging to any organization. I always feel like I should be able to do it on my own. My ego tells me I'm better than all this... I want to rebel against it, though of course, I don't really have any options.

XIV Solo con la belleza me conformo La fealdad me produce dolor I go along only with beauty Ugliness hurts me.

There's this road you're expected to be on. You're supposed to do your GCSEs and then your A levels and then you go to uni and then you get a proper job. I can see my whole life in front of me like a great slab of tarmac. What if I don't want it?

In his classic work Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, published in 1841, Scottish journalist Charles Mackay argued that people "go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."1 People in crowds often act in thoughtless ways—shouting profanities, destroying property, throwing bricks, threatening others.

Groupthink encourages conformity and this consistently leads back to trusting and following the leader, for it is through him or her that their cause will be achieved.

Almost everything is tuned to keeping the status quo shuffling along. When your life really takes off, some of your friends are very likely to perceive this as a threat because you, not they, are stepping out into a new future. They will cajole you to keep within conventional bounds, to be reasonable, to do the "right" thing.

Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed down from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth.

Peer pressure is when you decide to lob a few warheads at this week's Nazi because CNN told you to.

I do not like inconsistent! Why must it be so?

We inhabit a world in which we tend to put labels on each other and expect that we will then march through life wearing them like permanent sandwich boards.