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"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."
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"The opposite of bravery is not cowardice but conformity."
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Personal Development
"Group conformity scares the pants off me because it's so often a prelude to cruelty towards anyone who doesn't want to - or can't - join the Big Parade."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time. It seems implausible that our society could be gravely mistaken in its beliefs, and at the same time, that we would be alone in noticing the fact. We stifle our doubts, and follow the flock, because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown difficult truths. It is for help in overcoming our meekness that we can turn to the philosopher."
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Personal Development
"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."
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Personal Development
"Whatever you may be sure of be sure of this - that you are dreadfully like other people."
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Personal Development
"Put too many one-size-fits-all jackets on Americans and the place explodes."
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Personal Development
"Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth."
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Personal Development
"Most people are as happy as other people decide they should be."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Conformity is often more dangerous than war. War destroys the body but confomity destoys the imaginative mind."
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Personal Development
"The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.'"
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Personal Development
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"She gave me a pain in the ass, but she was very good looking."
Desire
"I don't know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn't make you happy."
Fulfillment
"I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human consciousness."
Art
"If you can't, or won't, think of Seymour, then you go right ahead and call in some ignorant psychoanalyst. You just do that. You just call in some analyst who's experienced in adjusting people to the joys of television, and Life magazine every Wednesday, and European travel, and the H-bomb, and Presidential elections, and the front page of the Times, and God knows what else that's gloriously normal."
Alienation
"I'm not trying to tell you," he said, "that only educated and scholarly men are able to contribute something valuable to the world. It's not so. But I do say that educated and scholarly men, if they're brilliant and creative to begin with - which, unfortunately, is rarely the case-tend to leave infinitely more valuable records behind them than men do who are merely brilliant and creative. They tend to express themselves more clearly, and they usually have a passion for following their thoughts through to the end. And--most important-nine times out of ten they have more humility than the unscholarly thinker."
Knowledge
"I didn't want any degrees if all the ill-read literates and radio announcers and pedagogical dummies I knew had them by the peck."
Education
"As much as anything else, it was a stare, not so paradoxically, of a privacy-lover who, once his privacy has been invaded, doesn't quite approve when the invader just gets up and leaves, one-two-three, like that."
Privacy
"Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out?"
Art
"Though we've talked and talked and talked, we've all agreed not to say a word."
Silence
"I am a dash man and not a miler, and it is probable that I will never write a novel. So far the novels of this war have had too much of the strength, maturity and craftsmanship critics are looking for, and too little of the glorious imperfections which teeter and fall off the best minds. The men who have been in this war deserve some sort of trembling melody rendered without embarrassment or regret. I'll watch for that book."
Creativity
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