Conformity Quotes

None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. Ah me! no man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding the God who seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret; they love to be blind in public. They think society is wiser than their soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The marriage of reason and nightmare that dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century – sex and paranoia…In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way.

~ J.g. Ballard

The press, the media, the internet—they'll make the noise, make the screaming, the screaming all the time, and the truth and my voice will be lost. The blaming and the noise, human things, they'll make it about human things, not the truth. How can anyone live with it? How can anyone live with so much screaming in their lives, all the time?

~ Claire North

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Soon after Justine Sacco's shaming, I was talking with a friend, a journalist, who told me he had so many jokes, little observations, potentially risqué thoughts, that he wouldn't dare to post online anymore.'I suddenly feel with social media like I'm tiptoeing around an unpredictable, angry, unbalanced parent who might strike out at any moment,' he said. 'It's horrible.'He didn't want me to name him, he said, in case it sparked something off.We see ourselves as nonconformist, but I think all of this is creating a more conformist, conservative age.'Look!' we're saying. 'WE'RE normal! THIS is the average!'We are defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside of it.

~ Jon Ronson

Disrobe both conformity and rebellion to find true independence.

~ Khang Kijarro Nguyen

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.... It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

National Review's premise was that conformity was especially egregious among the intellectuals, that herd of independent minds.

~ George F. Will

Let's make our own way,' says the Mother, 'and not in this boat.

~ Lorrie Moore

The thing I've never understood about dancing till now is that it only looks stupid when you're on the outside, watching other people do it. When you're part of the crowd, moving along with everyone else, I can't imagine anything else being quite as much fun.

~ Tom Ryan

The uncertainties in life are so uncertain for us to determine the kind of woe we shall be entangled in in the next future. When you stay dormant, your life is at risk; when you dare to take a step, you take a step to take a risk. We have a choice. Yes! a choice to choose to dare to get to our real reasons on earth or to choose to live in mediocrity and conformity, but, we ought to note that, it is riskier to risk nothing when the life we live is always at risk

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Lord, please protect me from Your people.

~ Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

If a man does not keep pace with hiscompanions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Lethim step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple-tree oran oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer?

~ Henry David Thoreau

Realism arises from the maturity of the minds, while Idealism arises from their conformity.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

I do not see the point in dressing and acting and speaking in a way that makes you feel more comfortable and me feel less comfortable.

~ Dan Pearce

Think about the word mould for a moment. A mould is a device into which one crams and smashes something until it becomes the shape that they desire. Don't spend your life letting other people destroy you while they try and force you into their moulds.

~ Dan Pearce

All the heroes of tomorrow are the heretics of today.

~ E.y. Harburg

We are the anarchists your parents warned you about.

~ Suzy Kassem

College: two hundred people reading the same book. An obvious mistake. Two hundred people can read two hundred books.

~ John Cage

That is the true challenge--to work within a narrow confine. To accept what you cannot have, that from which you cannot deviate.

~ Whitney Otto

Ought one to surrender to authority even if one believed that that authority was wrong? If the answer was yes, then I knew that I would always be wrong, because I could never do it. Then how could one live in a world in which one's mind and perceptions meant nothing and authority and tradition meant everything? There were no answers.

~ Richard Wright

They need a social mechanism to make us require conformity of one other, and the best way to do that is to provide a mechanism to make us punish our own deviants.

~ Charles Stross

The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, monomedicine. The belief that there is only one right way to live, only one right way to regulate religious, political, sexual, medical affairs is the root cause of the greatest threat to man: members of his own species, bent on ensuring his salvation, security, and sanity.

~ Thomas Szasz

Insecurity of the spirit demands completeness elsewhere.

~ Peter Ackroyd

I, for one, hope that youth will again revolt and again demoralize the dead weight of conformity that now lies upon us.

~ Howard Mumford Jones

The credit which the apparent conformity with recognized scientific standards can gain for seemingly simple but false theories may, as the present instance shows, have grave consequences.

~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences.

~ H. P. Lovecraft

Fear, conformity, immorality: these are heavy burdens. They drain us of creative energy. And when we are drained of creative energy, we do not create. We procreate, but we do not create.

~ David Mccallum

The opposite for courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.

~ Jim Hightower

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.

~ Rollo May

The so-called modern education, with all its defects, however, does others so much more good than it does the Negro, because it has been worked out in conformity to the needs of those who have enslaved and oppressed weaker peoples.

~ Carter G. Woodson

It's both rebellion and conformity that attack you with success.

~ Amy Tan

We cannot expect that all nations will adopt like systems, for conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

~ John F. Kennedy