Best 436 quotes in «conformity quotes» category

The search for truth is a cooperative, unending endeavor. We can, and should, engage in it to the extent we can and encourage others to do so as well, seeking to free ourselves from constraints imposed by coercive institutions, dogma, irrationality, excessive conformity and lack of initiative and imagination, and numerous other obstacles.

The suppression of inner patterns in favor of patterns created by society is dangerous to us.

These are the sensations and feelings that are gradually blunted by education, staled by custom, rejected in favor of social conformity.

The virtue in most request is conformity.

The struggle to be original hates conformity, but the struggle to be better disregards it, or takes advantage of it to build workable conventions.

They taught me different was wrong.

They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

The worst curse to befall anyone is stagnation, a banal existence, the quiet desperation that comes out of a need for conformity.

The truth of practical intellect is understood not as conformity to an extramental being but as conformity to a right desire; the end is no longer to know what is, but to bring into existence that which is not yet.

To be a hero you have to learn to be a deviant — because you're always going against the conformity of the group.

To be original, or different, is felt to be "dangerous.

Traditional American values: Genocide, aggression, conformity, emotional repression, hypocrisy, and the worship of comfort and consumer goods.

Until we lose ourselves there is no hope of finding ourselves.

To go to war without the Security Council will not be in conformity with the Council.

Tradition implies authority, conformity, imitation, following.

Unfortunately what came out of it was also kind of an imitation community with a lot of mindless conformity.

...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.

We come from the mentality, that rarely sees the horror in symmetry or the beauty in non-conformity

We arrange our lives-even the best and boldest men and women that exist, just as much as the most limited-with reference to what society conventionally rules and makes right.

We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value - a test, it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity.

We must reject all notions of 'reform' that serve up more of the same: more testing, more 'standards', more uniformity, more conformity, more bureaucracy.

We ought, so far as it lies within our power, to aspire to immortality, and do all that we can to live in conformity with the highest that is within us; for even if it is small in quantity, in power and preciousness, it far excels all the rest.

We pray to be conventional. But the wary Heaven takes care you shall not be, if there is anything good in you. Dante was very badcompany, and was never invited to dinner.

We're so many, we're so hard to distinguish from each other, but we long to be distinguished.

We're all getting lashed to the great wheel of uniformity.

We are half ruined by conformity, but we should be wholly ruined without it.

We should celebrate variety rather than conformity and allow people to express themselves. That we don't is more of our denial.

When a village ceases to be a community, it becomes oppressive in its narrow conformity. So one becomes an individual and migrates to the city. There, finding others like-minded, one re-establishes a village community. Nowadays only New Yorkers are yokels.

Whenever I'm asked to identify my best work, or my favorite, my answer has always been the same - 'My next one!'

When I am told I am too old to do something, I try to do it right away.

When I was younger, not being accepted made me enraged, but now, I am not inclined to dismantle my history. If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes-and we become attached to the heroic strain in our personal history.

We show wisdom by a decent conformity to social etiquette; it is excess of neatness or display that creates dandyism in men, and coquetry in women.

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other. Originality is deliberate and forced, and partakes of the nature of a protest. A society which gives unlimited freedom to the individual, more often than not attains a disconcerting sameness.

When some folks agree with my opinions I begin to suspect I'm wrong.

What is called common sense is excellent in its department, and as invaluable as the virtue of conformity in the army and navy,--for there must be subordination,--but uncommon sense, that sense which is common only to the wisest, is as much more excellent as it is more rare.

Woe to him inside a non-conformist clique who does not conform to non-conformity.

A blackbird doesn't change its tune to suit the times.

A closed conforming society is a sick society waiting to die from stagnation and inner illness. Only openness is the treatment.

A formal education will teach you how to conform with society. Self-education will teach you how to get out of conformity so that you can fill your life with adventure and beauty.

A head can be beaten small enough until it fits the hat.

American culture is a sheep culture—long on talk about individualism, but even longer on absolute conformity. Most still believe that individuality is based on which model car you like best—commodity identity, a selection of personalities on a shelf full of products approved by the Federal Identity Administration. I’m a Taurus aspiring to be a Lexus.

All to often, on the long road up, young leaders become servants of what is rather than shapers of what might be.

Am I a prisoner of my thoughts? Am I a prisoner of my societal conformity? Who am I? How conscious am I? Am I conscious or obnoxious?

Am I corrupted if I believe that the people who think alike are more admirable and estimable than those who think for themselves? If no one thought differently, then where would our innovations come from? How would we ever advance beyond the status quo? Corruption isn't just moral or ethical in nature--rust is a form of corruption, one that eats away at its host like a parasite, constantly making it less than it was the day before. The belief that they should hold in greater esteem those who think alike is a form of rust, something that doesn't allow our young people to grow beyond the limitations already established by those who do think alike.

You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.

A more fundamental problem with labelling human distress and deviance as mental disorder is that it reduces a complex, important, and distinct part of human life to nothing more than a biological illness or defect, not to be processed or understood, or in some cases even embraced, but to be ‘treated’ and ‘cured’ by any means possible—often with drugs that may be doing much more harm than good. This biological reductiveness, along with the stigma that it attracts, shapes the person’s interpretation and experience of his distress or deviance, and, ultimately, his relation to himself, to others, and to the world. Moreover, to call out every difference and deviance as mental disorder is also to circumscribe normality and define sanity, not as tranquillity or possibility, which are the products of the wisdom that is being denied, but as conformity, placidity, and a kind of mediocrity.

Being a good person is not nearly as honourable as being yourself.

And it never even occurs to them their certainty that they are different is what makes them the same.

A true education opens the mind and lets us see the world with wonder and joy. It teaches us to accept change with love, and it teaches us to be harmonious with humanity and nature. If any education teaches us to close our minds, to accept dogma, and to violently inhibit questioning then that is not an education. That is a prison for the mind.

A whole nation cannot rise above itself.