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"The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else."
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Exlpore more Conformity quotes
"Conformity rules society not wisdom or simplicity."
"It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so - I don't know - not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and - sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way."
"When things don't change, their sameness becomes an accretion. That is why all society puts on flesh. Succumbs to the cubicles and begins to fill them."
"I had not, it seems, the originality to chalk out a new road to shame and destruction, but trode the old track with stupid exactness not to deviate an inch from the beaten centre."
"People like us are dead to society unless we're pretentious, tell people what they want to hear, take off our clothes, or pretend to be like them."
"Conformity keeps us closed minded."
"If I have forfeited the ability to wonder so as not to offend the tenets of the culture, and if I have sacrificed warm dreams on the cold altar of conformity, it is likely because I have somewhere traded the marvel of the infinite for the malaise of the finite."
"Most people are as happy as other people decide they should be."
"In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone."
"Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth."
Explore more quotes by H. L. Mencken
"Indeed it may be said with some confidence that the average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. There are moments when his cogitations are relatively more respectable than usual, but even at their climaxes they never reach anything properly describable as the level of serious thought. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought. That is to say, they never think anything that has not been thought before and by thousands."
"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."
"No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not."
"Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem-neat, plausible, and wrong."
"The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens."
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