Best 436 quotes in «conformity quotes» category

It never occurred to him to wonder how there could be so many people, so many shifting groups that he only saw once in so small a village. Not matter how many such scenes played out, he didn't wonder -- for Henry had become a very particular sort of person. He had been groomed to be a person who did not ask questions. He had not been told to be that way, but all the same he had been led to it, and now that he was there, he felt a great comfort.

It occurred to the man that the biggest problem with this staid world was the overwhelming demand for conformity. Everything was so eerily definitive: assent to the mandates of society would see you on the rise, but dissent was a steady downward path.

It’s better to be a “misfit” than a “one-size-fits-all”!

It shouldn't be very difficult for anyone to resist the temptation to force himself into the pattern of the structured man. One needs only to remember that a groove may be safe--but that, as one wears away at it, the groove becomes first a rut and finally a grave.

It’s the binary of normative/transgressive that’s unsustainable, along with the demand that anyone live a life that’s all one thing.

It’s true, though, others won’t understand me. I know that. I’m still an alien in the American Christian subculture. Each evening I retreat from it, and I go straight to the Gospels. It's not out of duty that I read about Jesus; it's a respite.

It takes money to make money, even begging. Humans are herd animals. If a stranger’s bleeding to death beside the road, most people won’t stop to offer a Band-Aid. But get the ball rolling with a couple Good Samaritans, and before you know it you’ve got more eager philanthropists than you know what to do with.

It was a bland, tranquilized, life-adjusted, group-integrated sort of face -- the face turned out in thousands of copies every year by the educational production lines on Terra.

Many marriages would have been laid to rest a long time ago, if they were not on a life-support machine called other people’s opinions and/or expectations.

I've known one thing for a long time: there's a role in the big machine even for someone who makes fun of it.

Lord, please protect me from Your people.

Many of the men who did not really want to get married are married to women who did not really want to get married.

Many people are not conforming with theism, but they are comfortable with spiritualism.

I wished I was back in the convenience store where I was valued as a working member of staff and things weren’t as complicated as this. Once we donned our uniforms, we were all equals regardless of gender, age, or nationality— all simply store workers.

Many of the boys and men who are regarded as immature by some females are so deemed merely because they do not want to get married someday … or soon.

Master Timekeeper: Not everyone thinks so. Most people enjoy order. Harlequin: I don't, and most of the people I know don't." Master Timekeeper: That's not true. How do you think we caught you? Harlequin: I'm not interested. Master Timekeeper: A girl named pretty Alice told us who you were. Harlequin: That's a lie. Master Timekeeper: It's true. You unnerve her. She wants to belong, she wants to conform, I'm going to turn you off.

Modern party-dance is simply writhing to suggestive music. It is ridiculous, silly to watch and excruciatingly embarrassing to perform. It is ridiculous, and yet absolutely everyone does it, so that it is the person who does not want to do the ridiculous thing who feels out of place and uncomfortable and self-conscious . . . in a word, ridiculous. Right out of Kafka: the person who does not want to do the ridiculous thing is the person who is ridiculous. [...] Modern party-dance is an evil thing.

Most adults’ minds are still teenagers.

Monkey see, monkey do. Human being don’t see, human being don’t do.

Most human beings would have never been pained by the death of a human being if they had never seen a human being or pretending to be pained by that.

Most often we call a person intelligent when they learn to conform to the societal norm. Are they wise?

Most people are just a waste of sanity.

Most people believe most of the things they believe only because they believe that most people believe them.

Most people say that Shakespeare rocked merely because most people say that Shakespeare rocked.

Most sane human beings who are over the age of six usually act or react not as per what they genuinely feel or really think but in accordance with the expectations of those around them.

Most people want so desperately to be an individual yet are so easily shaped by the media.

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

Nobody in the whole world is normal. That's an idea made up by clothing companies to sell t-shirts. It doesn't exist in nature. Everybody gets to be weird in their own special way.

No one can give you freedom or set you free until you change your awareness and consciousness and break the walls of conformity.

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.

Nowadays, ads don't just sell a product. They sell an attitude! Look at this one! Here's a cool guy saying nobody tells him what to do. He does whatever he wants and he buys this product as a reflection of that independence. So basically, this maverick is urging everyone to express his individuality through conformity in brand-name selection?

Normal people are just freaks who are afraid to be themselves in public.

Of course there is a way to stop the rampant spread of beauty. It has to do with regimentation, conformity, assemblyline aesthetics, and the triumph of the functional over the haphazard.

Obinze imagined him, dutiful and determined, visiting the places he was supposed to visit, thinking, as he did so, not of the things he was seeing but of the photos he would take of them and of the people who would see those photos. The people who would know that he had participated in these triumphs.

People are always quick to call evil what they do not know. The unknown sprouts fear. It spreads like an infection, burrowing into every facet of their lives. They need a scapegoat, someone to blame. Fingers are pointed, accusations are made, and a target lands on somebody’s back. They grow angry. They turn violent. To history, human nature must be a stubborn and tiring student. No matter how many times history tries to show it the error of its ways, it never learns from its mistakes.

On Earth, Liz was constantly occupied with studying and finding a college and a career and all those other things that the adults in her life deemed terribly important. Since she had died, everything she was doing on Earth had seemed entirely meaningless. From Liz's point of view, the question of what her life would be was now definitively answered. The story of her life is short and pointless: There once was a girl who got hit by a car and died. The end.

Peer pressure accounts for much of the promiscuous sex in high schools and colleges. “Conform or get lost.” Since no one enjoys losing friends or being cast out of his own circle, peer pressure—especially during the years of adolescence—is an almost irresistible force.

[People] ask themselves, what is suitable for my position? What is usually done by persons of my station and percuniary circumstances? Or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary in preference to what suits their own inclinations. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things that are commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own.

One of our most deep-seated fears is that we might be called an “outsider.” This fear has led us down the road to conformity, has put the imprint of “the organization man” on our souls, and has robbed us of originality of thought, individuality of personality, and constructive action.

Opinions of the masses kill the 'extra' in an 'extraordinary' idea.

Or, to choose another example, we feel that freedom of speech is the last step in the march of victory of freedom. We forget that, although freedom of speech constitutes an important victory in the battle against old restraints, modern man is in a position where much of what "he" thinks and says are the things that everybody else thinks and says; that he has not acquired the ability to think originally—that is, for himself—which alone gives meaning to his claim that nobody can interfere with the expression of his thoughts. Again, we are proud that in his conduct of life man has become free from external authorities, which tell him what to do and what not to do. We neglect the role of the anonymous authorities like public opinion and "common sense," which are so powerful because of our profound readiness to conform to the expectations everybody has about ourselves and our equally profound fear of being different. In other words, we are fascinated by the growth of freedom from powers outside of ourselves and are blinded to the fact of inner restraints, compulsions, and fears, which tend to undermine the meaning of the victories freedom has won against its traditional enemies. We therefore are prone to think that the problem of freedom is exclusively that of gaining still more freedom of the kind we have gained in the course of modern history, and to believe that the defense of freedom against such powers that deny such freedom is all that is necessary. We forget that, although each of the liberties which have been won must be defended with utmost vigor, the problem of freedom is not only a quantitative one, but a qualitative one; that we not only have to preserve and increase the traditional freedom, but that we have to gain a new kind of freedom, one which enables us to realize our own individual self, to have faith in this self and in life.

Out of the 6.8 billion people in the world, these girls wanted their lives to end, wanted negative things to happen to them. In my world, that wasn't normal. I probably wasn't normal in their world, either.

Peons must have conformity. The instinct to seek it is in their souls. It is what makes them peons. It is the essence of peonhood

People like us are dead to society unless we’re pretentious, tell people what they want to hear, take off our clothes, or pretend to be like them.

People who are considered normal enjoy putting those who aren't on trial, you know.

Popularity gives you power only over people who care about being popular. Ostracism gives you power only over those who fear being ostracized.

Public opinion is less tolerant than any system of law.

Pure hearts will be Christlike. It is God’s desire that we be conformed to the image of His Son.

Prime numbers are divisible only by 1 and by themselves. They hold their place in the infinite series of natural numbers, squashed, like all numbers, between two others, but one step further than the rest. They are suspicious, solitary numbers, which is why Mattia thought they were wonderful. Sometimes he thought that they had ended up in that sequence by mistake, that they'd been trapped, like pearls strung on a necklace. Other times he suspected that they too would have preferred to be like all others, just ordinary numbers, but for some reason they couldn't do it. This second thought struck him mostly at night, in the chaotic interweaving of images that comes before sleep, when the mind is too weak to tell itself lies.

Remember, the opposite of bravery is not cowardice, but conformity.