Quotes About Conformity

Don't cut it," he said gruffly. "But no one'll see my tattoos if I don't." "Wear it up." -Dimitri, Rose, Dimitri

I also suddenly realized that, as unlikely as it seemed, Adrian and I had a lot in common. Both of us were constantly boxed in by others' expectations. It didn't matter that people expected everything of me and nothing of him. We were still the same, both of us constantly trying to break out of the lines that others had defined for us and be our own person. Adrian Ivashkov—flippant, vampire party boy—was more like me than anyone else I knew.

El estudio de la Palabra de Dios debe dirigirse a su aplicación a nuestra vida, con el resultado de que las Escrituras nos cambien para que nos conformemos más a la voluntad de Dios.

Normal is the average of deviance.

humans are much more like sheep than cats. They're easily led and they don't look where they're going until it's too late.

The reward for conformity was that everyone liked you except yourself.

The reward for conformity is that everyone likes you but yourself.

Sometimes we've accepted rules and codes and limits without realizing it.

What happens is our lives become so heavily oriented around the expectations of others that we become more and more like them and less and less like ourselves. We become split. I was split. I had this person I knew I was made to be, yet it was mixed in with all of these other ... people. As the lights were turned on, I saw I had all of this guilt and shame because I wasn't measuring up to the image of the perfect person I had in my head.

normal's the watchword

So what was this place in which people were rewarded for working out the answer the teacher wanted them to give, rather than the right answer?

Drop dead-but first get permit

Customs tell a man who he is, where he belongs, what he must do. Better illogical customs than none; men cannot live together without them.

Here, by the grace of God and an inside straight, we have a personality untouched by the psychotic taboos of our tribe - and you want to turn him into a carbon copy of every fourth-rate conformist in this frightened land! Why don't you go whole hog? Get him a brief case and make him carry it wherever he goes - make him feel shame if he doesn't have it.

Being "up to something" was the unnamable and unforgiveable crime for which any American male could be indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced in one breath. He wondered how things had gotten rigged so that the male half of the race must always behave to suit feminine rules and feminine logic, like a snotty-nosed school boy in front of a stern teacher.

We can be selective, applying precisely the required amount of pressure at the specified point at a designated time—we've never been told to go down and kill or capture all left-handed redheads in a particular area, but if they tell us to, we can. We will.

What statute was violated, if any, in turning a man exactly ninety degrees from everything else?

Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws—always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up.

Thorby had two choices. Be adopted quietly or make a fuss and be adopted anyhow

He even let himself be vaccinated again rather than go back to the I Spy and dig out the piece of paper that showed he had been vaccinated on arrival Earthside a few weeks earlier.

something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: "Please pass this so that I won't be able to do something I know I should stop.

The individual act of obedience is the cornerstone not only of the strength of authoritarian society but also of its weakness.

The same would apply to a Dominican inquisitor in the middle ages who lacked the capacity to "see" witches everywhere. In such authoritarian situations, it is important to see what the Top Dogs (alpha males) see; it is inconvenient, and possibly dangerous to see what is objectively happening.

As Paul Watzlawick notes, that which is objectively repressed (unspeakable) soon becomes subjectively repressed (unthinkable). Nobody likes to feel like a coward and a liar constantly. It is easier to cease to notice where the official tunnel-reality differs from existential fact. Thus SNAFU accelerates and rigiditus bureaucraticus sets in — the last stage before all brain activity ceases and the pyramid is clinically dead as an intellectual entity.