Quotes About Conformity

It never occurred to him to wonder how there could be so many people, so many shifting groups that he only saw once in so small a village. Not matter how many such scenes played out, he didn't wonder -- for Henry had become a very particular sort of person. He had been groomed to be a person who did not ask questions. He had not been told to be that way, but all the same he had been led to it, and now that he was there, he felt a great comfort.

If they make you put on a suit, it's because they are going to do something horrible to you. I guarantee it.

I put my pants on one leg at a time, just like everyone else. It's the way I take them OFF that makes me better than you.

Here is what I think now, reading what I wrote down for the police at age fifteen, right after I was raped. I was a good girl. Always a good girl, even when I was bad. I did my homework. If I can only be good enough, someone will eventually notice that I am trying so hard, exhausting myself with my effort to be good. This is true even today.

We often reward mediocrity because it is comforting. If they can do it, anyone can do it.

Singapore is what your city could become if everyone obeyed the rules, did their jobs diligently, and just shut up. When your city gets to be this paragon of efficiency and discipline, would you still want to live there? Singapore is a model city, which is terrific if you happen to be a model human.

One can only understand the power of the fear to be different, the fear to be only a few steps away from the herd, if one understands the depths of the need not to be separated.

The incidence of alcoholism, drug addiction, compulsive sexualism, and suicide in contemporary Western society are symptoms of this relative failure of herd conformity.

Analyse those dynamic factors in the character structure of modern man, which made him want to give up freedom in fascist countries and which so widely prevail in millions of our own people.

La maggior parte della gente non si rende nemmeno conto del proprio bisogno di conformismo. Vive nell'illusione di seguire le proprie idee ed inclinazioni, di essere individualista, di aver raggiunto da sé le proprie convinzioni; e si dà il fatto che le sue idee siano le stesse della maggioranza.

We have become automatons who live under the illusion of being self-willing individuals.

The loss of the self has increased the necessity to conform, for it results in a profound doubt of one's own identity.

It is not enough that men are not slaves; if social conditions further the existence of automatons, the result will not be love of life, but love of death.

This loss of identity then makes it still more imperative to conform; it means that one can be sure of oneself only if one lives up to the expectations of others.

The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.

Contemporary society preaches this ideal of unindividualized equality because it needs human atoms, each one the same, to make them function in a mass aggregation, smoothly, without friction; all obeying the same commands, yet everybody being convinced that he is following his own desires.

modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want. In order to accept this it is necessary to realize that to know what one really wants is not comparatively easy, as most people think, but one of the most difficult problems any human being has to solve.

The only haven for having a sense of identity is conformity. Being acceptable really means not being different from anybody else. Feeling inferior stems from feeling different, and no question is asked whether the difference is for the better or the worse.

the individual must blind himself from seeing that which his group claims does not exist, or accept as truth that which the majority says is true, even if his own eyes could convince him that it is false. The herd is so vitally important for the individual that their views, beliefs, feelings, constitute reality for him, more so than what his senses and his reason tell him.

Union by conformity is not intense and violent; it is calm, dictated by routine, and for this very reason often is insufficient to pacify the anxiety of separateness.

While psychiatry is concerned with the question of why some people become insane, the real question is why most people do not become insane.

War es denn nicht auch manchmal schön gewesen? Hatte er immer nur die Lüge gespürt, die hier umging, und die böse heimliche Gewalt, die aus ganzen Kindergenerationen gehorsame Bürger machte? Es war manchmal schön gewesen, aber nur trotzdem.

Die bequemste öffentliche Meinung ist noch immer die öffentliche Meinungslosigkeit.

Isterijos ir baim?s apimti žmon?s seka paskui lozungus, nepriklausomai nuo to, kas ir kieno vardu juos skelbia, jei tik r?ksnys pažada masei prisiimti sunki? m?stymo našt? ir atsakomyb? už tai, ko ji bijo, bet negali išvengti.