Conformity Quotes

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“The marriage of reason and nightmare that dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century – sex and paranoia…In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way.”
― J.G. Ballard

“The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Who were you before the world told you what you were not?”
― Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

“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! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“The problem is that we humans are deep conformists.”
― Robert Greene, Mastery

“Ought one to surrender to authority even if one believed that that authority was wrong? If the answer was yes, then I knew that I would always be wrong, because I could never do it. Then how could one live in a world in which one's mind and perceptions meant nothing and authority and tradition meant everything? There were no answers.”
― Richard Wright, Black Boy

“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.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“It's time for a new National Anthem. America is divided into two definite divisions. The easy thing to cop out with is sayin' black and white. You can see a black person. But now to get down to the nitty-gritty, it's getting' to be old and young - not the age, but the way of thinking. Old and new, actually... because there's so many even older people that took half their lives to reach a certain point that little kids understand now.”
― Jimi Hendrix

“The uncertainties in life are so uncertain for us to determine the kind woe we shall be entangled in in the next future. When you stay dormant, your life is at risk; when you dare to take a step, you take a step to take a risk. We have a choice. Yes! a choice to choose to dare to get to our real reasons on earth or to choose to live in mediocrity and conformity, but, we ought to note that, it is riskier to risk nothing when the life we live is always at risk.”
― Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

“Whatever question arose, a swarm of these drones, without having finished their buzzing on a previous theme, flew over to the new one and by their hum drowned and obscured the voices of those who were disputing honestly.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Sophistication is upscale conformity.”
― James Richardson

“But I still wonder how it was possible, in those graceless years of transition, long ago, that men did not see whither they were going, and went on, in blindness and cowardice”
― Ayn Rand, Anthem

“The Master said of Gong Yechang, “He is marriageable. Although he was once imprisoned and branded as a criminal, he was in fact innocent of any crime.” The Master gave him his daughter in marriage.
(Analects 5.1)”
― Confucius

“Don't get caught up in fashion games. These kids probably think we're old, nark conformists or something, but really, they're just conforming in their own ways. They're conforming to nonconformity.”
― Richelle Mead, Succubus Blues

“[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.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Being different is dangerous in a world that requires conformity”
― Jonathan Cardon

“Being yourself in a world which wants you to be someone else is the highest possible attainment.”
― Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

“Whenever I'm in the middle of conformity, surrounded by oneness of mind with people oozing concurrence on every side, I get scared. And when I find myself agreeing with everybody, too, I get terrified.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government

“With over a millennia of heritage behind them, each with their own glimpse of empire and some pinnacle of human expression (a Sistine Chapel or Götterdämmerung), now they were satisfied to express their individuality through which Rogers they preferred at the Saturday matinee: Ginger or Roy or Buck. America may be the land of opportunity, but in New York it's the shot at conformity that pulls them through the door.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“In general, opinions contrary to those commonly received can only obtain a hearing by studied moderation of language, and the most cautious avoidance of unnecessary offence, from which they hardly ever deviate even in a slight degree without losing ground: while unmeasured vituperation employed on the side of the prevailing opinion, really does deter people from professing contrary opinions, and from listening to those who profess them.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“I often felt the girls' speech was interchangeable, without any individuality whatsoever, a kind of herd-speak they had all agreed upon.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

“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.”
― H. Beam Piper, Little Fuzzy

“The cities were sucking all the life of the country into themselves and destroying it. Men were no longer individuals but units in a vast machine, all cut to one pattern, with the same tastes and ideas, the same mass-produced education that did not educate but only pasted a veneer of catchwords over ignorance. Why do you want to bring that back?”
― Leigh Brackett, The Long Tomorrow

“This is the history of governments, - one man does something which is to bind another. A man who cannot be acquainted with me, taxes me; looking from afar at me, ordains that a part of my labour shall go to this or that whimsical end, not as I, but as he happens to fancy. Behold the consequence. Of all debts, men are least willing to pay the taxes. What a satire is this on government! Everywhere they think they get their money's worth, except for these. Hence, the less government we have, the better, - the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance of the wise man, of whom the existing government, is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation. That which all things tend to educe, which freedom, cultivation, intercourse, revolutions, go to form and deliver, is character; that is the end of nature, to reach unto this coronation of her king. To educate the wise man, the State exists; and with the appearance of the wise man, the State expires. The appearance of character makes the State unnecessary. The wise man is the State. He needs no army, fort, or navy, - he loves men too well; no bribe, or feast, or palace, to draw friends to him; no vantage ground, no favourable circumstance. He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is a prophet; no statute book, for he has the lawgiver; no money, for he is value; no road, for he is at home where he is; no experience, for the life of the creator shoots through him, and looks from his eyes. He has no personal friends, for he who has the spell to draw the prayer and piety of all men unto him, needs not husband and educate a few, to share with him a select and poetic life. His relation to men is angelic; his memory is myrrh to them; his presence, frankincense and flowers.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Standing alone today demands even more courage and strength than it did in former cultures. From infancy, children have been programmed to perform. Rather than living from their own needs and feelings, they learn to assess situations in order to please others. Without an inner core of certainty grounded in their own musculature, they lack the inner resources to stand alone. Pummelled by mass media and peer group pressures, their identity may be utterly absorbed by collective stereotypes. In the absence of adequate rites of passage, ad-men become the high priests of an initiation into the addictions of consumerism.”
― Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation

“The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. . . . The force of character is cumulative.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance and Other Essays

“A whole nation cannot rise above itself.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

“You cannot really not care about what other people think of you and still wear a perfume or cologne.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana