Quotes About Conformity

Cliff never wondered what Americans would do if the Russians, or the Nazis, or the Japanese, or the Mexicans, or the Vikings, or Alexander the Great ever occupied America by force. He knew what Americans would do. They'd shit their pants and call the fucking cops. And when they realized the police not only couldn't help them but were working on behalf of the occupation, after a brief period of despair, they'd fall in line.

I am convinced that creativity is a priori to the integrity of the universe and that life is regenerative and conformity meaningless.

What makes us Reformed is how we understand Scripture, and this understanding is summarized in our confession. If we thought that our confession was not biblical, we would not use it, and if anyone can show that our confession is unbiblical, the church ought to revise it to bring it into conformity with Scripture.

I wonder whether there is such a thing as a sense of individuality. Is it all a facade, covering a deep need to belong? Are we simply pack animals desperately trying to pretend we are not?

There is none more conformist than one who flaunts his individuality.

You had to get another degree in order to become a productive member of an evil society.

Of course I received various permutations of the "Who will want to marry you if you read so much?" lecture, but I also had to endure the chilly "Don't try to be so different from normal people." Different from normal people? When I first heard that, I was sorely offended. I thought every person should live for art, not just me, and furthermore, why would I want to be normal? Why would I want to be stupid like everyone else?

Rarely was Arabic used for physics, chemistry, or mathematics in any of the schools of Beirut, whose main curriculum has always been community conformity. It seems that Arabic is not considered a language for logic. A joke that used to make the rounds when I was a child, probably still going strong: the definition of parallel lines in geometry textbooks in Saudi Arabia is two straight lines that never meet unless God in all His glory wills it.

Look at the way things are now. Just a set of crab in barrel and all of a sudden one crab just appear with a jacket and tie and telling everybody that he is not a crab any more. Ridiculous little place with ridiculous little people.

The child, who is decked with prince's robes and who has jewelled chains round his neck loses all pleasure in his play; his dress hampers him at every step. In fear that it may be frayed, or stained with dust he keeps himself from the world, and is afraid even to move. Mother, it is no gain, thy bondage of finery, if it keep one shut off from the healthful dust of the earth, if it rob one of the right of entrance to the great fair of common human life.

The fact is, those who are like everyone else arouse no hatred unless there is a reason. But when a resplendent inner self pierces the grossness that envelops it, some, quite irrationally, extend it heartfelt adoration; others, just as irrationally, try heart and soul to insult it.

I confess that a man, who is not within his place in the common society, can be guilty, but it's certain that no human being, like the sword, can stay always in his scabbard.

The child who is decked with prince's robes and who has jewelled chains round his neck loses all pleasure in his play; his dress hampers him at every step. In fear that it may be frayed, or stained with dust he keeps himself from the world, and is afraid even to move. Mother, it is no gain, thy bondage of finery, if it keep one shut off from the healthful dust of the earth, if it rob one of the right of entrance to the great fair of common human life. O

often she has crippled her children's minds and narrowed their lives in order to fit them into her social forms;

Language is not only the medium through which existence is transacted, it constitutes our central experiences of social and moral content, of such concepts as freedom and truth, and, most importantly, of indivduality and the self; it is also a system of lies, evasions, propaganda, misrepresentation, and conformity.

and having never felt all that womanly in the first place, I believe the habit of impersonation has gone deeper in me than most, to the extent that some aspects of me do seem in fact to be male... The fact is that I received the clear message from the very beginning that everything would have been better- would have been right, would have been how it ought to be- had I been a boy.

He had come to the conclusion that most questions were nothing more than an attempt to ascertain conformity, like rudimentary maths problems. Two and two did indeed usually equal four: it was when you gave a different answer, he had discovered, that people got upset.

I read somewhere that a space station is always slowly falling back to earth, and that every few months or so a rocket has to be sent to push it back out again. In rather the same way, a woman is forever dragged at by an imperceptible force of biological conformism; her life is relentlessly iterative; it requires energy to keep her in orbit. Year after year she'll do it, but if one year the rocket doesn't come then down she'll go.

I felt so out of place at the Miss India pageant. I had just come back from America, and I was told I needed to lose my American accent and learn the Queen's English, so I had to enunciate my vowels and speak well and eloquently. Giving up a New York accent is pretty hard.

Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion.

As a little girl in the '50s, I couldn't wear a purple-and-white flowered skirt with a red blouse - those colors were too loud. My parents were not into that 'We are Negros that wear all beige,' but there was a line you could walk over that could signal vulgar, crass, rather than clever use of color. And that outfit crossed over the line.

I was one of the many horses pulling the wagon and couldn't escape left or right because of the will of the driver.

A small foot in China, no different from a tiny waist in Victorian England, represented the height of female refinement. For families with marriageable daughters, foot size translated into its own form of currency and a means of achieving upward mobility. The most desirable bride possessed a three-inch foot, known as a 'golden lotus.'

I got in trouble in Catholic school for rolling the waist of my skirt down.