Quotes on Nonconformity

Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.

Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.

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

Its hard to be a diamond in a rhinestone world.

How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!

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.

The cynic says, "One man can't do anything". I say, "Only one man can do anything."

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

The value of a man should be seen in what he gives and not in what he is able to receive.

Individuality realized is the supreme attainment of the human soul, the master-master's work of art. Individuality is sacred.

At this time is freedom anything but the right to live as we wish? Nothing else.

Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity, and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom.

That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.

The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful is the cause of half their errors.

I may not be better than other people, but at least I'm different.

Human diversity makes tolerance more than a virtue; it makes it a requirement for survival.

To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.