Quotes About Conformity

Students follow rules. Students complete assignments. The job of students - in part, at least - is to please their teachers. Now, I realize I may be exaggerating a little here, but basically I think I'm right: students do what they're told.

Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.

Isn't the dull pain of the centrists conformity delicious, edgelord?

With selective hearing, these individuals will hold to the status quo and gravitate toward those who will tell them what they want to hear at the neglect of what they need to hear.

I think the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself.

If the world was truly a rational place, men would ride sidesaddle.

If the world were a logical place, men would ride side-saddle.

hypothetical, because, as Kafka shows, success within an institution requires one to accept its rules, including its system of hierarchy, so that anything different becomes intolerable, even unthinkable. Josef K. is the supreme example of a professional man committed to order. His arrest

Progress does not come from following the norms, but instead by breaking them. What is normal remains the same and therefore we must depart from the past.

will become whatever I believe a person wants me to be in order to be liked. With

The greatest intellectual and moral offense the modern intellectual can be found guilty of is that of seeming to think or act outside what is commonly held to be the linear progress of civilization.

When you live entirely among madmen, it is difficult to know how sane you are.

The conformist is filled with the need for approval. He can never get enough. He runs from one person to another seeking compliments and endorsements for his behavior and actions. As a child, he turned to parents and teachers; when he started to work, to his boss and fellow workers; in marriage, he turned to his mate. He must always have someone around to pat him on the head and tell him he is doing a good job. This bolsters up his poor self-esteem.

The opposite of bravery is not cowardice but conformity.

The normal is that which nobody quite is. If you listen to seemingly dull people very closely, you'll see that they're all mad in different and interesting ways, and are merely struggling to hide it.

But in modern America we often shame the wrong people. Instead of deterring behavior that undermines the common good, shame is too often deployed against people who don't fit in—to ostracize them even further.

As more windows shatter, other aspects of community life also start unraveling. The unspoken norm becomes: Do whatever you want here because everyone else is doing it.

Since 95 percent of the people are imitators and only 5 percent initiators, people are persuaded more by the actions of others than by any proof we can offer.

First, we seem to assume that if a lot of people are doing the same thing, they must know something we don't.

In general, when we are unsure of ourselves, when the situation is unclear or ambiguous, when uncertainty reigns, we are most likely to look to and accept the actions of others as correct.

Without question, when people are uncertain, they are more likely to use others' actions to decide how they themselves should act.

We will use the actions of others to decide on proper behavior for ourselves, especially when we view those others as similar to ourselves.

Once again we can see that social proof is most powerful for those who feel unfamiliar or unsure in a specific situation and who, consequently, must look outside of themselves for evidence of how best to behave there.

Social scientists have determined that we accept inner responsibility for a behavior when we think we have chosen to perform it in the absence of strong outside pressures. A