Conformity Quotes

“Society won't stand for it.
It's not society. You're the one who won't stand for it--right?
If you do such a thing society will make you suffer for it.
It's not society. It's you, isn't it?
Before you know it, you'll be ostracized by society.
It's not society. You're going to do the ostracizing, aren't you?”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“She’d grown up, but even now she still believed strongly in society. She had always been exemplary in learning to be a woman, truly a straight-A student. It looked excruciatingly tiring.”
― Sayaka Murata, Earthlings

“let me tell you something, little girl.
the line is gray.
you can like lipstick
and worms.”
― Jenny Noble Anderson

“Self love will be the immunity from every infectious community that makes you sick of being who you are.”
― Curtis Tyrone Jones

“So, with the feeling of a man who will die in the next hour for lack of air, he felt his way toward his open, separate, and therefore cold bed.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Strangers come and violate you. Strangers come and cut your heart out. Strangers come and take your blood.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Every night, the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning. There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl’s better off dead.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, powerless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine percent of them is in a book. Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for the shore.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts the lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“There was a silly damn bird called a Phoenix back before Christ. Every few hundred years, he built a pyre and burned himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up, he sprang out of the ashes; he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we’re doing the same thing, over and over, but we’ve got one damn thing the Phoenix never had. We know the damn silly things we just did. We know all the damn silly things we’ve done for thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, some day we’ll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember, every generation.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“And hold onto one thought: You’re not important. You’re not anything. Some day the load we’re carrying with us may help someone. But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn’t use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died before us. We’re going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we’re doing, you can say, We’re remembering. That’s where we’ll win out in the long run. And some day, we’ll remember so much that we’ll build the biggest goddamn steam shovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up. Come on now, we’re going to go build a mirror factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“As his rhetoric and reading life matured, he grew intensely scornful of what passed at his high school for 'education' - the mania for testing; the intolerance of real dissent; and the conformist celebration of the honed and polished 'all-rounder' student destined for high income, who was deferent and well-spoken, invariably good-looking, and proficient in music as well as in one summer and one winter sport.”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“True innovation comes not from following the crowd, but from daring to think different and standing out loud.”
― Shawpelle Mellowness, BREAK THE MOLD: The Power and Importance of Non-Conformity and Innovation

“There are not many things that the different approaches of modern psychology agree about, but there is one thing that they all agree about: that people in groups and organizations, simply put, become more stupid. Individually people are more intelligent, because they have to take more responsibility. But in a group, people do not have to take the same amount of responsibility. People in groups and organizations tend to get caught up in the need of the ego to create hierarchies of power, status, positions, roles, norms and conformity.
All organizations are more or less dysfunctional. The sign of a dysfunctional group is that the members of the group play three roles and positions: aggressor,denier and victim. It is always easier to follow the group without reflection or awareness, than to trust your own heart, to trust your own intelligence,truth, wisdom and creativity. It is not always easy to follow your own heart,
but it always leads your right.”
― Swami Dhyan Giten, Meditation: A Love Affair with the Whole - Thousand and One Flowers of Silence, Love, Joy, Truth, Freedom, Beauty and the Divine

“Uphold principle, not prejudice.
Uphold reason, not rigidity.
Uphold duty, not derangement.
Uphold correction, not conformity.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Aşk Mafia: Armor of The World

“Conform to no inkling ancestral,
Conform to no habit historical.
Conform to no force external,
Submit only to love universal.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Aşk Mafia: Armor of The World

“Marian found all this feminist generalisation and assertion both tedious and exhausting.”
― Ethel Mannin, Lucifer and the Child

“-THIS MANY PEOPLE CAN’T BE WRONG
If people can see one another’s choices, and if they are merely copying each other, wisdom becomes stupidity in a hurry. In doubting our own judgment and defaulting to conformity, we transform ourselves from individuals into members of the herd. And before we know it, this seed of error can become a copying cascade that devours all other knowledge and leaves a collective illusion in its wake.
It’s terrifyingly easy to start a copying cascade. ... And make no mistake, no one is immune to this trap— even people who should know better.”
― Todd Rose, Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions

“The Powers That Be: the corporate, government, and nonprofit actors who work to preserve the status quo, and the forces in the world who want us all to fit into our proper places in an established social hierarchy, from which they can look down on us and make sure we don't fuck with the money and privilege they hoard.”
― Toshio Meronek, Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary

“Because most societies and companies reward compliance. They do that because when you comply:
1. Your behavior is predictable.
2. You are not a threat to anyone because you are “normal.”
3. People don’t feel inferior because of your special aptitude or attitude.
4. You are easier to understand because you are like everyone else.
5. Companies find it much easier and efficient to apply one standard set of policies and procedures irrespective of your attitude or aptitude and hence prefer those who fit in. This also allows them to scale.
So, you can see that being “normal” is mainly for the benefit of others, not for you.”
― Binod Shankar, Let's Get Real: 42 Tips for the Stuck Manager

“Consider how many conservatives are motivated by hatred of the wealthy or elites. They do not know who these elites are, and have never met them, which is why they cannot comprehend that these elites are simply getting wealthy by following the trend cascade.

Such “conservatives” talk about guillotines and revolutions as if these would solve the situation, forgetting that what got us into this situation was overthrowing our natural leaders and replacing them with the temporary favorites of the mob.

The people who succeed in this society do so by taking advantage of trends. If a lot of people believe something, there is money and power in it. Therefore, if you want to succeed, you repeat the dogma and intensify it without considering that it is true.

Nothing else explains why you suddenly have circus freaks walking the streets, working in government, and dominating what is left of your arts and culture. The elites, Freemasons, Jews, Bilderbergers, Davos, and Illuminati did not do this to you; you did it to yourselves.”
― Brett Stevens

“Every night, the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward the morning. There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Our current definition of health is tied to the state and employers' desire for productive, inoffensive conformity...It is only by expanding our definition of what is acceptable human behaviour and working to meet other people's manifold needs that we can move forward.”
― Devon Price, Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity

“Someone interrupted him: "Modern art was a movement directed against the bourgeoisie and against its world."

"Yes," said Jaromil, "but if it had really been logical in its negation of the contemporary world, it would have had to reckon with its own disappearance. It would have had to know—and it would have had to wish—that the revolution would create a totally new kind of art, an art in its own image."

"So you approve," said the woman with the alto voice, "of pulping Baudelaire's poetry, prohibiting all modern literature, and shoving the cubist paintings in the National Gallery into the cellar?"

"A revolution is an act of violence," said Jaromil, "that's well known, and surrealism itself knew very well that old-timers have to be brutally kicked off the stage, but it didn't suspect that it was one of them.”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“Because they will live in a fear and when people live in a fear, they obey.”
― Lenka Dvorcakova, Crazy game called Life

“I emphasized what I believe is the most alarming phenomenon of today’s civilization, which is that the average man, today, can also be calibrated in the most amazing ways, convinced that Swedish furniture and plastic flowers, and only those things, are beautiful; that certain tall, blue-eyed blondes, and only they, are beautiful; that only a certain toothpaste is good; a certain surgeon, the only one capable; a certain political party, the only repository of truth.”
― Primo Levi, Histoires naturelles / Vice de forme

“Any religion that wants only believers, has nothing to do with the truth but about conformity.

Truth works regardless of beliefs.”
― Chidi Ejeagba

“Грубо кажучи, я виріс у культурі допиту, практики поводження на допиті. Мусиш відповісти хоч щось, коли дійде до тебе. Усе, що ти скажеш, може обернутися проти тебе. Уникни брехні, в якій заплутаєшся. І правди, яка потягне за собою близьких. І ніколи ні у чому не переконуй ідіотів, бо ідіот своє знає наперед.”
― Taras Prokhasko, Бурчак