top of page
.png){kind=small}
"In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Conformity quotes
"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 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."
"A big element of what they regard as conformity is simply a desire to have an audience."
"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."
"Most people are as happy as other people decide they should be."
"Stay in the middle of the bell-curve of social norms and follow along, or you will find out the about freedom you never had."
"Fashion condemns us to many follies the greatest is to make oneself its slave."
"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."
"The opposite of bravery is not cowardice but conformity."
"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."
Explore more quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith
"There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting."
"The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor."
"There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished."
"By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man."
"You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too."
"Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not."
"The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself."
"The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture."
"Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence."
bottom of page