Selected conformity quotes

1. Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

2. Good sense travels on the well-worn paths; genius, never. And that is why the crowd, not altogether without reason, is so ready to treat great men as lunatics.

3. While the easiest way in metaphysics is to condemn all metaphysics as nonsense, the easiest way in morals is to elevate the common practice of the community into a moral absolute.

4. Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this.

5. Except for those who think in terms of pious platitudes or dogma or narrow prejudice (and those thoughts we aren't interested in), people don't speak their beliefs easily, or publicly.

6. We are to a large extent an imitative society.

7. There is a powerful craving in most of us to see ourselves as instruments in the hands of others and thus free ourselves from the responsibility for acts which are prompted by our own questionable inclinations and impulses.

8. Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.

9. All mass movements avail themselves of action as a means of unification. The conflicts a mass movement seeks and incites serve not only to down its enemies but also to strip its followers of their distinct individuality and render them more soluble in the collective medium.

10. The desire to belong is partly a desire to lose oneself.

11. Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.

12. I worry about my judgment when anything I believe in or do regularly begins to be accepted by the American public.

13. We're supposed to procreate and society, god knows, is ferocious on the subject. Heterosexuality is considered such a great and natural good that you have to execute people and put them in prison if they don't practice this glorious act.

14. We're the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. Everybody's afraid to be thought in any way different from everyone else.

15. If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up.

16. Instead of boiling up individuals into the species, I would draw a chalk circle round every individuality, and preach to it to keep within that, and preserve and cultivate its identity.

17. The opposite for courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.

18. In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

19. The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

20. It is undoubtedly easier to believe in absolutes, follow blindly, mouth received wisdom. But that is self-betrayal.

21. In early times, the great majority of the male sex were slaves, as well as the whole of the female. And many ages elapsed, some of them ages of high cultivation, before any thinker was bold enough to question the rightfulness, and the absolute social necessity, either of the one slavery or of the other.

22. Stupidity is much the same all the world over. A stupid person's notions and feelings may confidently be inferred from those which prevail in the circle by which the person is surrounded. Not so with those whose opinions and feelings are an emanation from their own nature and faculties.

23. How far should one accept the rules of the society in which one lives? To put it another way: at what point does conformity become corruption? Only by answering such questions does the conscience truly define itself.

24. Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers.

25. Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs.

26. Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The they, which supplies the answer to the who of everyday Da-sein, is the nobody to whom every Da-sein has always already surrendered itself, in its being-among-one-another.

27. I don't say you're self-censoring - I'm sure you believe everything you're saying; but what I'm saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting.

28. The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.

29. Thus for each blunt-faced ignorant one The great grey rigid uniform combined Safety with virtue of the sun. Thus concepts linked like chainmail in the mind.

30. Well I've got to get out of the rat-race now I'm tired of the ways of mice and men And the empires all turning into rust again. Out of everything nothing remains the same That's why I'm cloud hidden Cloud hidden Whereabouts unknown.

31. An influential member of parliament has not only to pay much money to become such, and to give time and labour, he has also to sacrifice his mind too - at least all the characteristics part of it that which is original and most his own.

32. Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.

33. 'The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.'

34. Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

35. The successful politician owes his power to the fact that he moves within the accepted framework of thought, that he thinks and talks conventionally. It would be almost a contradiction in terms for a politician to be a leader in the field of ideas. His task in a democracy is to find out what the opinions held by the largest number are, not to give currency to new opinions which may become the majority view in some distant future.

36. Nothing, it is true, is more common than for both Science and Art to pay homage to the spirit of the age, and for creative taste to accept the law of critical taste.

37. It does not prove a thing to be right because the majority say it is so.

38. In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by 'thou shalt not', the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by 'love' or 'reason', he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.

39. A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.

40. The word 'heresy' not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word 'orthodoxy' not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong. All this can mean one thing, and one thing only. It means that people care less for whether they are philosophically right.

41. In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.

42. When an opinion has taken root in a democracy and established itself in the minds of the majority, it afterward persists by itself, needing no effort to maintain it since no one attacks it. Those who at first rejected it as false come in the end to adopt it as accepted, and even those who still at the bottom of their hearts oppose it keep their views to themselves, taking great care to avoid a dangerous and futile contest.

43. Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech, and action derived by the conformants [sic] from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that they themselves are sane.

44. We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.

45. There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted.

46. Have you seen what they're doing to movies now? They show the movie to a test audience, then change it depending on whether these 200 random yahoos liked it or did not like it, as though we are all one, as though we all have the same taste, as though, as though, as though.

47. You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you worry you are an interchangeable cog.

48. Ethan is annoyed with all of these dumb campaigns that indoctrinate millions of people into thinking they're tough-guy free spirits when, in fact, there's probably much to be said for following and, in any event, the food chain isn't structured to encompass millions of non-followers.

49. Is there anything in the world more annoyingly creepy than an unspoken dress code?

50. It is characteristic of theistic 'tolerance' that no one really cares what the people believe in, just so they believe or pretend to believe.

51. Rather would I have the love songs of romantic ages, rather Don Juan and Madame Venus, rather an elopement by ladder and rope on a moonlight night, followed by the father's curse, mother's moans, and the moral comments of neighbors, than correctness and propriety measured by yardsticks.

52. Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other.

53. The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.

54. Good men make good rhinoceroses, unfortunately.

55. All pleasure is a vice, for seeking pleasure is what everybody does in life, and the only dark vice is doing what everybody does.

56. The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

57. Kein Hirt und Eine Heerde! Jeder will das Gleiche, Jeder ist gleich: wer anders fuhlt, geht freiwillig in's Irrenhaus.

58. Any fool can make a rule And any fool will mind it.

59. You wanted to look at life for yourself - but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional!

60. We go by the major vote, and if the majority are insane, the sane must go to the hospital.

61. It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so - I don't know - not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and - sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way.

62. Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?

63. The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, they finish by loading honors on your head.

64. Originality consists in trying to be like everybody else - and failing.

65. Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be...

66. The last verse [In My Secret Life] completely got to me, about how we all have great ideals but in reality we end up conforming, following everyone else. We want to be stronger so we lead that life inside, thinking of ourselves as these great brave souls. I literally thought when I was 15 that I was a musical genius and I could change the world, but in fact you're not and you can't and you don't, and that realisation is almost heartbreaking.

67. Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.

68. The naked every day he clad When he put on his clothes.

69. I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood.

70. To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.

71. Closed eyes listen, afraid to see on their own. Easily influenced and simply conformed.

72. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

73. One of the requisites of sanity is to disagree with the majority of the British public.

74. In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from.

75. Robert Arctor halted. Stared at them, at the straights in their fat suits, their fat ties, their fat shoes, and he thought, Substance D can't destroy their brains; they have none.

76. One is always afraid of upsetting their conventionalities.

77. The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this problem by defying their elders and copying each other.

78. Another friend began to say, 'Well, Quentin has a problem of adjusting himself to society and he...' This sentence was never finished. The ballet teacher expostulated, 'I don't agree. Quentin does exactly as he pleases. The rest of us have to adapt ourselves to him.'

79. The heretics have not thought and suffered and died in vain. Every heretic has been, and is, a ray of light.

80. Most men are followers, and implicitly rely upon the judgment of others. They mistake solemnity for wisdom, and regard a grave countenance as the title page and Preface to a most learned volume. So they are easily imposed upon by forms, strange garments, and solemn ceremonies. And when the teaching of parents, the customs of neighbors, and the general tongue approve and justify a belief or creed, no matter how absurd, it is hard even for the strongest to hold the citadel of his soul. In each country, in defence of each religion, the same arguments would be urged.

81. Colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed.

82. For the most part, colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed.

83. Now and then somebody examines, and in spite of all keeps his manhood, and has the courage to follow where his reason leads. Then the pious get together and repeat wise saws, and exchange knowing nods and most prophetic winks. The stupidly wise sit owl-like on the dead limbs of the tree of knowledge, and solemnly hoot. Wealth sneers, and fashion laughs, and respectability passes by on the other side, and scorn points with all her skinny fingers, and all the snakes of superstition writhe and hiss, and slander lends her tongue, and infamy her brand, and perjury her oath, and the law its power, and bigotry tortures, and the church kills.

84. But it is better to be a fool than to be dead. It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity. Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind. For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!

85. Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.

86. The World, thinking itself affronted by superior merit, takes delight to bring it down to its own level.

87. 'In Japan, everyone strives to be the same. (...) What I like most about America is that everyone is an individual.'

88. Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, 'I don't want to be just another blade of grass.'

89. The fear of missing out means today's media, more than ever before, hunts in a pack. In these modes it is like a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits. But no-one dares miss out.

90. ...what I am doing is going along with the fact that I live in a society where meat eating is accepted as the norm, and it requires a level of social courage which I haven't yet produced to break out of that. It's a little bit like the position which many people would have held a couple of hundred years ago over slavery. Where lots of people felt morally uneasy about slavery but went along with it because the whole economy of the South depended upon slavery.