Quotes About Conformity

Surveillance breeds conformity.

Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think.

I had good grades in school, but I was always in trouble. I used to get suspended and I'm not very good at being told what to do.

The first time I was in his office was when they called me in to tell me they had changed my name. I had a feeling that if I'd gone along with the name they'd chosen, I'd never be seen again. I'd be swallowed up by that name, because it was a false name: Kit Marlowe.

I was bullied from the age of 11 onwards. I was always much bigger than the other kids. I spoke nicely, didn't swear, and I refused to try to fit in and be like everyone else. People assumed I thought I was above everyone else.

In Sweden, you're not supposed to think you are someone.

Sweden is a great country. What is not so great is that we have a society that, in a way, says it's great if you don't look right, if you don't look left, if you just look straight forward.

I don't want to make the same mistakes of being swept along with things, taking on jobs that I'm not passionate about, that I don't really believe in but that everyone says I should do.

The 1990s, in New York at least, were all about who could have the baggiest pants, and I definitely got swept up in that fad. Luckily, it didn't last long - but I've made sure that my pants fit ever since.

People wanted to be friends with me for not the right reasons. They'd introduce me to somebody else as the Olympian or the swimmer. I didn't want to stand out. I wanted to blend in.

I'd go to swim practice, put my face in the water, and I didn't have to talk to anybody. Swimming was like my escape, but it was also like this huge prison because I felt like I had to swim up to people's standards.

I had a baseball swing my whole life. When I was growing up, everyone had a different, very specific softball swing that was very short. And I had a big stride and I had, you know, a baseball swing, and people did not like it.

I want to know where is that committee in Switzerland that sits to decide what is in and what is out. I don't listen to the formula makers. I think maybe I have a selective hearing disorder.

I wanted to have no ribs. I wore what was called a waist-nipper in those days. My mother made it. It's a piece of rubber band I wore around to hold my rib cage in. I don't know why I always loved that. I guess I was a glutton for punishment. I think I was born one of those people who loved swords and fought in armor.

When I grew up, you needed to have straight hair. It's symbolic of needing to be like everyone else, needing to look like everyone else. And what that meant was looking like the dominant ruling class in America.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

It is obvious that discrimination exists. Women do not have the opportunities that men do. And women that do not conform to the system, who try to break with the accepted patterns, are stigmatized as odd and unfeminine.

When you're a young rebellious kid, you think you can beat the system, and when you grow up you realize you can't.

Standardization of our educational systems is apt to stamp out individualism and defeat the very ends of education by leveling the product down rather than up.

Nice tights," I snorted. Or I tried to snort, anyway. I'm not exactly sure how, though people in books are always doing it.

We all march to the drum,"she murmured."However we are raised, however we are trained, it never seems to leave us. Do you think we can break free?" . . . "We can all learn,"he answered."All grow and change. That choice is ours to make.

Passive, submissive imitation does exist, but hatred of conformity and extreme individualism are no less imitative. Today they constitute a negative conformism that is more formidable than the positive version. More and more, it seems to me, modern individualism assumes the form of a desperate denial of the fact that, through mimetic desire, each of us seeks to impose his will upon his fellow man, whom he professes to love but more often despises.

tandis que le rationaliste vulgaire, fût-il l'homme le plus ignorant de toute philosophie, est au contraire le plus empressé à se proclamer tel, en même temps qu'il se pare fièrement du titre plutôt ironique de « libre-penseur », alors qu'il n'est en réalité que l'esclave de tous les préjugés courants de son époque.

A mere glance at things as they are is enough to make it clear that the aim is everywhere to reduce everything to uniformity, whether it be human beings themselves or the things among which they live, and it is obvious that such a result can only be obtained by suppressing as far as possible every qualitative distinction.