Best 436 quotes in «conformity quotes» category

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.

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 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 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 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.

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.

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

Lord, please protect me from Your people.

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.

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.

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

Most people are just a waste of sanity.

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

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.

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

Most adults’ minds are still teenagers.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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] 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.

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