Quotes About Conformity

Much easier it was to follow orders than to think for oneself.

And when people commend someone for "thinking for herself" they usually mean "ceasing to sound like people I dislike and starting to sound more like people I approve of.

Why would people ever think, when thinking deprives them of "the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved

My fellow academics, taken as a group, are just as reluctant to engage in genuine reflection as the less highly educated person in the street. Academics have always been afflicted by unusually high levels of conformity to expectations: one of the chief ways you prove yourself worthy of an academic life is by getting very good grades, and you don't get very good grades without saying the sorts of things that your professors like to hear.*6

But perhaps when you were too obedient, and did not do openly what others did, and were quiet in church and hard-working at school, then some unknown rebellion brewed in you, doing harm to you, though how I do not understand.

This might be the most important question for every creator and maker in the world: how do you make something new if most people just like what they know? Is it possible to surprise with familiarity?

He was a nobody. One of those shy kids who turned into social invalids when that first blast of adolescence hit, meekly accepted their fate, and became invisible.

If you do grow up feeling as though you don't quite fit in as a child, it's very easy to decide you're certain not going to fit in as an adult. You hang on to your eccentricities and hate the idea of conforming. It's a common pattern.

One area which shows how unknowingly predictable we are, is the way we decorate our houses. We all feel we make unique and distinct choices, yet we all conform to a cultural standard.

I had broken the most basic commandment of our culture: Thou shalt pretend there is nothing wrong.

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years." The question still hangs heavy in the air: If our behavior is not making us happy, why do we act this way?

We are told that standardized testing must be imposed to make sure students meet a set of standardized criteria so they will later be able to fit into a world that is itself increasingly standardized. Never are we asked, of course, whether it's good to standardrize children (sorry, I mean students), knowledge, or the larger world.

Frequently we imagine that we are behaving in a particular way because such behaviour accords with some abstract, lofty code of moral principles, when in reality all we are doing is obeying a deeply ingrained and long 'forgotten' set of purely imitative impressions.

The greatest human fear is validation.

Tadaka subscribes to no rules, Ahalya breaks a rule while Sita follows all rules.

Objectivity is obsessed with exactness and tends to be rather intolerant of deviation, almost

secepat itu Indi memvisualisasikan sepasang sepatu tua yang disembunyikan di bawah tangga. Sepatu nyaman yang selalu dipakai ketika kaki pemiliknya letih. Namun, ketika sang pemilik ingin menghadapi dunia, dia tak mungkin memilih sepatu itu. Akan dipakainya sepatu mentereng yang memang diperuntukkan sebagai pendampingnya. Dunia menuntut demikian. Sekalipun tidak nyaman, tapi itu kewajiban.

sameness, not difference, provokes our greatest anxiety

We are all of us, men and women both, the creatures of culture: we do and feel what our societies ask us to, and the demands put upon us are not always consistent or precisely correlated with biology.

Too much good taste can be boring

Too much good taste can be very boring.

There is a wrong way of staying in the world and a wrong way of fleeing from it. In both cases we are fashioning ourselves according to the world.

To be conformed to the one who has become human—that is what being really human means.[77.]

To be conformed to the image of Christ is not an ideal to be striven after. It is not as though we had to imitate him as well as we could. We cannot transform ourselves into his image; it is rather the form of Christ which seeks to be formed in us (Gal. 4.19), and to be manifested in us. Christ's work in us is not finished until he has perfected his own form in us. We must be assimilated to the form of Christ in its entirety, the form of Christ incarnate, crucified and glorified.