Best 436 quotes in «conformity quotes» category

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 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 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.

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 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 miss all of the adventures and stand against the progress of society.

If you conform, you can never reform.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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 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 proportion as men were all to resemble each other, and to have faces and manners in common, their self-love was not to be disturbed by any thing in the shape of individuality. A writer might be na tural, but he was to be natural only as far as their sense of nature would go, and this was not a great way. Besides, even when he was natural, he hardly dared to be so in language as well as idea ;- there gradually came up a kind of dress, in which a man’s mind, as well as body, was to clothe itself.

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.

In the midst of a crowd, an individual's layers of restraint peel away, revealing potentially barbaric instincts and a susceptibility to a "crowd contagion.

I reached into my pocket and too 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 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.

It is easy to conform, but it takes great courage to stand up for peace.

It is ironic that political correctness, conformity, and laws serve to make us inhuman, yet that is often the word used to describe those who do not conform.

It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time. It seems implausible that our society could be gravely mistaken in its beliefs, and at the same time, that we would be alone in noticing the fact. We stifle our doubts, and follow the flock, because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown difficult truths. It is for help in overcoming our meekness that we can turn to the philosopher.

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

It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

It is often asked, “How could the early disciples turn the world upside down when millions of Christians can’t even keep it right side up today?” The answer is they didn’t conform their faith to match the world. They had the truth, and they refused to water it down. They had a faith that would not compromise.

It is often difficult to educate a child about the beauty of an open mind when he is a prisoner of societal conformity.

It is precisely when their interior worlds change shape that Bezukhov and Bolkonsky are confirmed as individuals; that they surprise; that they make themselves different; that their freedom catches fire, and with it the identity of their selves; these are moments of poetry: they experience them with such intensity that the whole world rushes forward to meet them with an intoxicating parade of wondrous details. In Tolstoy, man is the more himself, the more an individual, when he has the strength, the imagination, the intelligence, to transform himself. By contrast, the people I see changing their attitude toward Lenin, Europe, and so on expose their nonindividuality. This change is neither their own creation nor their own invention, not caprice or surprise or thought or madness; it has no poetry; it is nothing but a very prosaic adjustment to the changing spirit of History. That is why they don't even notice it; in the final analysis, they always stay the same: always in the right, always thinking what, in their milieu, a person is supposed to think; they change not in order to draw closer to some essential self but in order to merge with everyone else; changing lets them stay unchanged. Another way of expressing it: they change their mind in accordance with the invisible tribunal that is also changing its mind; their change is thus simply a bet on what the tribunal will proclaim to be the truth tomorrow.

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 is very difficult to break free from the prison of conformity and fixed false beliefs without changing our level of consciousness and awareness.

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

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.

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.