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Conformity Quotes
"The opposite of bravery is not cowardice but conformity."
26
"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."
25
"Once conform once do what others do because they do it and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul."
22
"I then endeavoured to show that it is more especially in the thorough conformity with law which natural phenomena and natural products exhibit, and in the comparative ease with which laws can be stated, that this difference exists."
21
"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."
21
"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."
21
"A big element of what they regard as conformity is simply a desire to have an audience."
21
"Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth."
21
"In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone."
20
"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."
18
"Put too many one-size-fits-all jackets on Americans and the place explodes."
18
"Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you're not really interested in order to get where you're going."
18
"Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream."
18
"Who was I fooling, telling my heart to quiet its beautiful song so I could march in the parade of conformity? My biggest fool was me."
17
"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."
17
"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."
16
"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."
16
"Conformity is the biggest enemy of progress. Break those limiting social rules."
15
"I enjoy being a lemming,we line up to do everything together."
15
"Conformity rules society not wisdom or simplicity."
14
"The problem with the 'herd' is that our voice is never 'heard'."
14
"Most people are as happy as other people decide they should be."
13
"Conformity keeps us closed minded."
13
"Conformity is often more dangerous than war. War destroys the body but confomity destoys the imaginative mind."
13
"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."
13
"Fashion condemns us to many follies the greatest is to make oneself its slave."
13
"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."
11
"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."
11
"A 'normal person' is what is left after society has squeezed out all unconventional opinions and aspirations out of a human being."
9
"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."
8
"People entered the park and became polite and cozy and fakey to each other because the atmosphere of the park made them that way. In the entire time he had lived within a hundred miles of it he had visited it only once or twice."
5
"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."
2
"Whatever you may be sure of be sure of this - that you are dreadfully like other people."
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