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"There is a comfort in conformity, a security in control, that is appealing. There is a thrill in domination, and we are all secretly attracted to violence."
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"Most people do not have a problem with you thinking for yourself, as long as your conclusions are the same as or at least compatible with their beliefs."

"Conformity rules society not wisdom or simplicity."

"A 'normal person' is what is left after society has squeezed out all unconventional opinions and aspirations out of a human being."

"Conformity is the biggest enemy of progress. Break those limiting social rules."

"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."

"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."

"A big element of what they regard as conformity is simply a desire to have an audience."

"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."

"Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born-never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything."

"Most people are as happy as other people decide they should be."
Explore more quotes by Tom Robbins


"Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works."


"Beer does not satisfy magic, however. So the magic ordered a round of Harvey Wallbangers. But it takes more than vodka to fuel magic. It takes risks. It takes EXTREMES."


"There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for."


"You know what I mean? Real and unreal, beautiful and strange, like a dream. It got me high as a kite, but it didn't last long enough. It ended too soon and left nothing behind.That's how it is with dreams, said Priscilla. "They're the perfect crime."


"Since when has leadership been a criterion for sanity? Or vice versa. Hitler was a gifted leader, even Nixon. Exhibit leadership qualities as an adolescent, they pack you off to law school for an anus transplant. If it takes, you go into government."


"Laws, it is said, are for the protection of the people. It's unfortunate that there are no statistics on the number of lives that are clobbered yearly as a result of laws: outmoded laws; laws that found their way onto the books as a result of ignorance, hysteria or political haymaking; antilife laws; biased laws; laws that pretend that reality is fixed and nature is definable; laws that deny people the right to refuse protection. A survey such as that could keep a dozen dull sociologists out of mischief for months."


"Meditation, said his teacher, "hasn't got a damn thing to do with anything, 'cause all it has to do with is nothing. Nothingness. Okay? It doesn't develop the mind, it dissolves the mind. Self-improvement? Forget it, baby. It erases the self. Throws the ego out on its big brittle ass. What good is it? Good for nothing. Excellent for nothing. Yes, Lord, but when you get down to nothing, you get down to ultimate reality. It's then and exactly then that you're sensing the true nature of the universe, you're linked up with the absolute Absolute, son, and unless you're content with blowing smoke up your butt all your life, that there's the only place to be."


"Salvation is for the feeble, that's what I think. I don't want salvation, I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb."
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