Conformity Quotes

Majority decisions tend to be made without engaging the systematic thought and critical thinking skills of the individuals in the group. Given the force of the group's normative power to shape the opinions of the followers who conform without thinking things through, they are often taken at face value. The persistent minority forces the others to process the relevant information more mindfully. Research shows that the deciscions of a group as a whole are more thoughtful and creative when there is minority dissent than when it is absent.

~ Philip G. Zimbardo

The question I'm most commonly asked is Why? A more pertinent question might be, why is it that more people don't attempt to escape the limitations imposed upon them? If Tracks has a message at all, it is that one can be awake to the demand for obedience that seems natural simply because it is familiar. Wherever there is pressure to conform (one person's conformity is often in the interests of another person's power), there is a requirement to resist. Of course I did not mean that people should drop what they were doing and head for the wilder places, certainly not that they should copy what I did. I meant that one can choose adventure in the most ordinary of circumstances. Adventure of the mind, or to use an old-fashioned word, the spirit.

~ Robyn Davidson

One of the greatest regrets in life is being what others would want you to be, rather than being yourself.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Life is for those that deserve it. Those kings amongst men who can climb out of barrels and will dare to break through glass walls and to transcend all of this whatever it is, these eyes to the ground, this pretence, acting only as is expected and never as is intended. We have been told what is acceptable in what situation and so we take heed. This is not living. In the real world, in nature, there is no need to pretend. There is no place for it.

~ Oli Anderson

Go beyond the boundary of conformity to find the true joy of life.

~ Debasish Mridha M.d.

Do not go for conformity that breeds mediocrity! Choose instead to stand for transformation that does not only transforms lives, but true purpose and living as well.

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Rebel children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory.

~ Russell Brand

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Logic is something the mind has created to conceal its timidity, a hocus-pocus designed to give formal validity to conclusions we are willing to accept if everybody else in our set will too.

~ Carl Lotus Becker

Society demands not conformity, but the appearance of conformity. That's the reason for hypocrisy.

~ Marty Rubin

Liar! I know that you humans build your life in lies. It starts with your mortal lords and their fabricated gods. They use fictitious stories to impregnate the minds of people, and like herds of sheep they do as their told. With manipulation alone is enough to secure their reign. After all, is it not in your nature to be wanted and purposeful? It is such an easy game to play. I have observed this falsehood accepted by fathers and mothers over and over again. The idiocy becomes one with their children, and they become the infrastructure that not only sedates but corrodes the soul with instructed conformity. In the end, lies are all that you are.

~ H.s. Crow

Normal people are just freaks who are afraid to be themselves in public.

~ Anonymous

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.

~ Donna Lynn Hope

I just know Maycomb. I'm not in the least sensitive about it, but good Lord, I'm certainly aware of it.

~ Harper Lee

When men live huddled together without true communication, there seems to be a greater sharing, and a more genuine communion. But this is not communion, only immersion in the general meaninglessness of countless slogans and clichés repeated over and over again so that in the end one listens without hearing and responds without thinking. The constant din of empty words and machine noises, the endless booming of loudspeakers end by making true communication and true communion almost impossible...

~ Thomas Merton

But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run amok against society; but I preferred that society should run amok against me, it being the desperate party.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Societal peer pressure to conform runs strong, but as more of us continue to think and act for ourselves, rather than be under the influence of group-think, we begin to make more effective choices.

~ Evita Ochel

Conformity rules society not wisdom or simplicity.

~ Debasish Mridha

Society tells me to follow my own truth, but I don't let society tell me what to do. If you need someone to tell you that, chances are you're part of the crowd that will move on to the next fashion that comes around.

~ Criss Jami

Most people want so desperately to be an individual yet are so easily shaped by the media.

~ Criss Jami

Life in society requires consensus as an indispensable condition. But consensus, to be productive, requires that each individual contribute independently out of of his experience and insight.

~ Solomon E. Asch

Popularity gives you power only over people who care about being popular. Ostracism gives you power only over those who fear being ostracized.

~ Robin Wasserman

He who fails to achieve a dream set by himself is more honorable than he who succeeds in achieving a dream set by his society.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I found it hateful, yet I wanted to be part of it.

~ Storm Constantine

To conform is to be average.

~ Manoj Vaz

What I’m starting to realize is that when you conform, people are not accepting you for who you are. They’re accepting you for who they think you are.

~ Kaiylah Muhammad

I've known one thing for a long time: there's a role in the big machine even for someone who makes fun of it.

~ Christa Wolf

The human spirit lives on creativity and dies in conformity and routine.

~ Vilayat Inayat Khan

I would rather be an artist than a leader. Ironically, a leader has to follow the rules.

~ Criss Jami

Companies preach creativity, hire for conformity and call consultants when they fail who tell them to be more creative.

~ Richie Norton

You need to make a decision - are you are an imitator or an innovator?

~ Stewart Stafford

An artist who conforms to conventional ideas is nothing but a mere charlatan.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

When students cheat on exams it's because our school system values grades more than students value learning.

~ Neil Degrasse Tyson

Curiosity is very important I think, and I think too much of education, starting with childhood education, is either designed to kill curiosity or it works out that way anyway.

~ Myles Horton

Shakespeare's work had a liberating influence.

~ Paul C. Nagel

Learning has been liberated from the despotism of the few and is now available to the mass public for one's own evolution. Yet many of us continue to find solace in illusions, in conformity to systematical oppression, in distractions that keep us mentally, socially and often physically retarded.

~ D. Allen Miller

Many marriages would have been laid to rest a long time ago, if they were not on a life-support machine called other people’s opinions and/or expectations.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

There is a time in a boy’s life when the sweetness is pounded out of him; and tenderness, and the ability to show what he feels, is gone.

~ Norah Vincent

Alas, everything that men say to one another is alike; the ideas they exchange are almost always the same, in their conversation. But inside all those isolated machines, what hidden recesses, what secret compartments! It is an entire world that each one carries within him, an unknown world that is born and dies in silence! What solitudes all these human bodies are!

~ Alfred De Musset

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

~ John Kenneth Galbraith