Quotes on Conformity

Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear.

...most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.

And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.

If it adapts itself to what the majority of our society wants, art will be a meaningless recreation.

To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflict than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity.

We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove.

...virtue is not merely a state in conformity with the right principle, but one that implies the right principle; and the right principle in moral conduct is prudence.

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

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

Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the danger of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of "crackpot" than the stigma of conformity.

Nature made us individuals, as she did the flowers and the pebbles; but we are afraid to be peculiar, and so our society resembles a bag of marbles, or a string of mold candles. Why should we all dress after the same fashion? The frost never paints my windows twice alike.

It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.

I say, when your hair turns gray and your children think they know who you are, do the thing that shakes up who you think you are, even who you had prided yourself on being. When all those around you say they simply don't recognize you any longer, that's the real compliment.

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.

Pour out wine till I become a wanderer from myself; for in selfhood and existence I have felt only fatigue.

But only in their dreams can men be truly free. It was always thus and always thus will be.

I had it then. Soda fought for fun, Steve for hatred, Darry for pride, and Two-Bit for conformity. Why do I fight? I thought, and couldn't think of any real good reason. There isn't any real good reason for fighting except self-defense.

Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened.

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.

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.