Best 436 quotes in «conformity quotes» category

for me obedience to another is the decay of self

For the first time, a whole generation had the economic & educational opportunity to turn their backs on the dead end factory jobs of their parents, who, traumatized by two world wars, had responded by creating a safety blanket of conformity.

For true liberation, you do not need to fight. You simply have to change your thoughts and drift away from conformity, comfort, security, and certainty of life and embrace and enjoy the possibilities and magnificence of the uncertainty of life.

Freedom began on the day the first sheep wandered away from the herd.

Free spirits don't run in packs.

From one dog all the dogs bark.

FRUITS AND NUTS Keep jumping around them like monkeys. The clones, Commercialized zombies, And the TV junkies. Keep throwing berries, Twigs, And nuts at them. Until they wake up To see what's up And figure out why We're laughing at 'em.

God’s purpose for us is that we ought to be conformed to the image of His Son. The world may exert its pressure to deform us, but we are told to “be transformed” [Romans 12:2 NIV].

Great people have one thing in common: they do not conform.

Group pressure is also a fascinating process to watch. Given enough arguments, time, and stress, even the most resolute and determined man can be made fearful enough to completely reverse his ideals to conform with everyone else.

Hazel, do you enjoy it?' I paused a second, trying to figure out if my response should be calibrated to please Augustus or his parents. 'Most of the people are really nice,' I finally said.

(He) committed the cardinal sin in a college atmosphere not only of being different but of being different in a way that left a lot of people with the impression that he thought he was better than they were.

Her mother, by showing her off all through childhood, had trained into her the instinct to defeat the expectations of others.

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.

Hold everything very carefully unless it is your lover’s back. Then, become metal, become teeth, do not gentle yourself for any man. Do not change for the ones who think that you should be softer, less mouth, less voice. You do not owe regrowth to anyone but yourself. When they begin to ask for you to shape yourself around them, leave. Shut the door firmly. Do not look back.

How could you tell how much of it was lies? It might be true that the average human being was better off now than before the Revolution. The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different. It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve. Great areas of it, even for a party member, were neutral and nonpolitical, a matter of slogging through dreary jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube, darning a worn-out sock, cadging a saccharine tablet, saving a cigarette end. The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering--a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons--a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting--three hundred million people all with the same face.

Idolized my innocence, Stole it from me in the end
 Now I’m wide awaken and still paying for the poison they sold me.

I am not trapped in the wrong body; I am trapped in a world that makes very little space for bodies like mine.

I became one of those anonymous Americans who tries to keep his mind sharp and inquisitive while performing all the humiliating rituals of the middle class

Ideological conformity depends on conditions of prosperity; it has no staying-power of its own.

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.

I don't make the rules, I just make it up.

I expected, as I approached the corporate world, to enter a brisk, logical, nonsense-free zone, almost like the military - or a disciplined, up-to-date military anyway - in its focus on concrete results. How else would companies survive fierce competition? But what I encountered was a culture riven with assumptions unrelated to those that underlie the fact- and logic-based worlds of, say science and journalism - a culture addicted to untested habits, paralyzed by conformity, and shot through with magical thinking.

If New Orleans is not fully in the mainstream of culture, neither is it fully in the mainstream of time. Lacking a well-defined present, it lives somewhere between its past and its future, as if uncertain whether to advance or to retreat. Perhaps it is its perpetual ambivalence that is its secret charm. Somewhere between Preservation Hall and the Superdome, between voodoo and cybernetics, New Orleans listens eagerly to the seductive promises of the future but keeps at least one foot firmly planted in its history, and in the end, conforms, like an artist, not to the world but to its own inner being--ever mindful of its personal style.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him 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 or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer?

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

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

If the First Toddler wears it, it has to be fashionable.

If unconventional ideas = sperm, then public opinion = abortion.

If we had to earn our age by thinking for ourselves at least once a year, only a handful of people would reach adulthood.

If you conform, you can never reform.

If you conform, you miss all of the adventures and stand against the progress of society.

If you don't play their game, you don't have to follow their rules.

If you wish to abrogate all responsibility for your moral and intellectual independence, then by all means - conform with the herd and obey blindly.

If you want to conform, then how can you change?

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

I’ll be washed and ironed. I’ll be washed and ironed and starched.

I'm saying that figuring out what's important in life and how to go about getting it is very difficult. Sometimes you get confused and you get tempted to just let other people make the rules. And some people are really happy to make the rules for other people. Adam Lyons, the man who runs the epiphany machine, is one of those people.

I meant does it hurt when you hide every last shred of your individuality and self worth behind acres of silk and cups of powder and smiles that never, no matter how hard you try, reach your eyes?

In addition to conformity as a way to relieve the anxiety springing from separateness, another factor of contemporary life must be considered: the role of the work routine and the pleasure routine. Man becomes a 'nine to fiver', he is part of the labour force, or the bureaucratic force of clerks and managers. He has little initiative, his tasks are prescribed by the organisation of the work; there is even little difference between those high up on the ladder and those on the bottom. They all perform tasks prescribed by the whole structure of the organisation, at a prescribed speed, and in a prescribed manner. Even the feelings are prescribed: cheerfulness, tolerance, reliability, ambition, and an ability to get along with everybody without friction. Fun is routinised in similar, although not quite as drastic ways. Books are selected by the book clubs, movies by the film and theatre owners and the advertising slogans paid for by them; the rest is also uniform: the Sunday ride in the car, the television session, the card game, the social parties. From birth to death, from Monday to Monday, from morning to evening - all activities are routinised, and prefabricated. How should a man caught up in this net of routine not forget that he is a man, a unique individual, one who is given only this one chance of living, with hopes and disappointments, with sorrow and fear, with the longing for love and the dread of the nothing and separateness?

In every southerner, beneath the veneer of clichés lies a much deeper motherlode of cliché. But even cliché is overlaid with enormous power when a child is involved.

In order to not feel alone, we conform our selves to masks and hide in social solitude. We ignore the inner geniuses and envy the others.

In shaking hands I was doing something that I was to do countless times in the years to come: acting in conformity with what others expected of me even though, by the very nature and form of life, I did not and could not share their spirit.

I reached into my pocket and took the medal and tossed it toward the black opening. It went right in. It disappeared into the darkness. Then I stepped onto the sidewalk and walked back home. When I got there my parents where doing various cleaning chores. It was a Saturday. Now I had to mow and clip the lawn, water it and the flowers. I changed into my working clothes, went out, and with my father watching me from beneath his dark and evil eyebrows, I opened the garage doors and carefully pulled the mower out backwards, the mower blades not turning then, but waiting.

I realized that we all have the ability to live in worlds of our own doing, to own what happens to us, and to shape our inner worlds with such a positive force that our outer worlds have no other choice but to conform.

I spent most of my life trying to specialize myself. I went to theater school, film school, music school, mime school ... Finally, I was able to gather enough knowledge to build the confidence to create my own work, that goes utterly against the sense of specialization.

I think one of the problems [with raising intelligent children in modern society] is compulsory schooling...and that children are sitting there, and they are taught and told what to believe; they are passive from the very beginning – and one must be very, very aggressive intellectually to have a high IQ [...] the child is taught. Right from the beginning, it's a passive process. He or she sits there, and they simply try to believe everything they're told?

It is a tragedy that many of God’s people have conformed themselves to the world and its thinking, rather than being transformed by the renewing of their minds.

I need not adapt in certain ways. I am in fact but a visitor to this world, an ephemeral gasp within its long, tired history, and, before anything else, a follower of Christ. By this alone I have the power not to shuffle away from the Faith, the power to break loose from these marching-shackles of ongoing cultural and political pretense.

In general, opinions contrary to those commonly received can only obtain a hearing by studied moderation of language, and the most cautious avoidance of unnecessary offence, from which they hardly ever deviate even in a slight degree without losing ground: while unmeasured vituperation employed on the side of the prevailing opinion, really does deter people from professing contrary opinions, and from listening to those who profess them.