Quotes About Conformity

Stay away from people who don't know who they are but want you to be just like them. People who'll want to label you. People who'll try to write their fears on your face.

Within a year or two of Lenin's death he was clearly the party's boss: having solidified his power, he was ready to resume the drive for Communism interrupted in 1921 by the introduction of the NEP. He had three related objectives: to build a powerful industrial base, to collectivize agriculture, and to impose on the nation complete conformity.

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

There's no such thing as neutral education. Education either functions as an instrument to bring about conformity or freedom.

Our advanced technological society is rapidly making objects of us and subtly programming us into conformity to the logic of its system to the degree that this happens, we are also becoming submerged in a new "Culture of Silence".

The world was filling up with people, it seemed to him, who pulled their punches everywhere they went in life. Light beer, decaf coffee, low-sodium seltzer.

Many people... go through life with hardly an original thought; gravitate from one pleasure or amusement to another; gain a livelihood doing what someone else has assigned; flee boredom as best they can; marry and beget children; and then, without having made the slightest difference of any unique significance, die and decay like any animal.

Before we can talk or walk, we are programmed to recognize norm violators - those whose antisocial behavior classifies them as "bad".

However, being moral can include not only acts of kindness but also deeds of conformity and violence.

Men are like sheep, of which a flock is more easily driven than a single one.

compared to individuals, groups tend to be more dogmatic, better able to justify irrational actions, more likely to see their actions as highly moral and have a tendency to form stereotypical views of outsiders.

Ought one to surrender to authority even if one believed that that authority was wrong? If the answer was yes, then I knew that I would always be wrong, because I could never do it. Then how could one live in a world in which one's mind and perceptions meant nothing and authority and tradition meant everything? There were no answers.

I wish to be an "I" no longer. I reject my "I." My desire is to be a "He." "When He is revealed, we shall be like Him" (1 John 3:2).

That's how we both got committed to this enormous delusion—because that's what it is, an enormous, obscene delusion—this idea that people have to resign from real life and 'settle down' when they have families.

They think the way to be a poet is to wear funny clothes and write sideways on the page.

A man could rant and smash and grapple with the State Police, and still the sprinklers whirled at dusk on every lawn and the television droned in every living room.

It's the great sentimental lie of the suburbs, and I've been making you subscribe to it all this time.

Don't you see what I'm saying? It's got nothing to do with definite, measurable talents - it's your very essence that's being stifled here. It's what you are that's being denied and denied and denied in this kind of life.

She was probably sixty, a big rawboned woman with a man's face, and her clothes, if not her very pores, seemed always to exude that dry essence of pencil shavings and chalk dust that is the smell of school. She was strict and humorless, preoccupied with rooting out the things she held intolerable: mumbling, slumping, daydreaming, frequent trips to the bathroom, and, the worst of all, "coming to school without proper supplies."  

The greatest changes in history have come when people were able to shake off what others told them to do.

What are you? An after school special?

Well, " she replied dryly, "there's no getting around that. And it's not me being nice. It's not even my choice. It's an order from my superiors. " "It still sounds like a pain in the ass for you. Why don't you just tell me where it is and blow them off? " "You obviously don't know the people I work for. " "Don't need to. I ignore authority all the time. It's not hard once you get used to it.

Don't get caught up in fashion games. These kids probably think we're old, nark conformists or something, but really, they're just conforming in their own ways. They're conforming to nonconformity.

Is it really so terrible being around us?" I blushed. "No," I said. "But . . . it's complicated. I've been taught certain things my entire life. Those are hard to shake." "The greatest changes in history have come because people were able to shake off what others told them to do.