Quotes About Conformity

Life kind of forces us to put these filters on, whether it's because someone told you you weren't good enough - excluded you or bullied you. Or maybe your parents screwed up on accident in some way and it changed who you were. There's this pressure to fit into a mold and change who you're supposed to be.

There are forms of oppression and domination which become invisible - the new normal.

The fastest way to succeed is to look as if you're playing by somebody else's rules, while quietly playing by your own.

Where once Lego offered a whimsical form of escapism into the world of the subconscious, encouraging creativity and imagination, it's transformed into a rigid 'box ticking' discipline where children are encouraged to build by conformity.

Everything happened relatively quickly in our rise to the top. But we were like robots. We were told what to do and we just did it. We didn't have time to look inside ourselves. It was all just a constant whirlwind.

For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous. Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings - all the human actions we think of as essential to a character - had be censored by the self lest they be punished by the state.

Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.

Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That's not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that's what life needs to be - and that if it's not that, it's all screwed up. It's not.

'Custom is the great deadener.' There is no doubt that we of the white race are going on obliviously supporting customs that would seem abhorrent and incredible to a higher and more brotherly civilization.

Toughening up, performing masculinity, pretending to enjoy things I didn't enjoy all enabled me to dodge the gender policing of the adults around me. But the way I really was - the swished hips, the Double-Dutching, the hair flips - seemed to always prevail and attract Dad's disdain.

Boys will be boys. And even that wouldn't matter if only we could prevent girls from being girls.

What I wear identifies me as a priest. I don't agree with all this trying to appear 'normal'. If you want that to be normal, don't take off your dog collar and then put it on again, because what you're doing is playing along with the view that wearing one makes you odd.

The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.

We are all prisoners of the ideas of the times we live in.

In private school, I definitely judged myself against the lighter-skinned girls. I wanted to have different hair. I wanted to fit in. I thought that was more beautiful.

The Nazi period could have happened only in Germany because the German education of obedience to any law and order was the main problem.

We're all unique as actors. To yourself, you are unique. You have to think, 'I'm me. I'm not going to bunch myself with other people.' Agents and producers have to get you into a box to accommodate their limited imaginations.

The medical profession is - and knows itself to be - endemically conservative and conformist.

Don't let the world define you. In the world of acting, and I think in any profession, really, people are really eager to put you in a box and categorize you as one particular thing.

For many of us, our proms were less Walt Disney's 'Cinderella' and more Stephen King's 'Carrie.' The less we spent on them, the better.

I always tried to be the perfect little girl. Always tried to have the perfect little manners. Never wanted to displease my parents.

People don't want to be diverse, or they're scared to be diverse. People just dress a certain way to fit in but sometimes being outside of the box is the cool thing to do.

In China, literally in elementary school, we have to sit a certain way. You can't raise your hand anytime, you can't speak in class. So it takes a lot of courage and experimenting to kind of try to break that.

A slavish bondage to parents cramps every faculty of the mind.