Conformity Quotes

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.

Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.

When I was young my teachers were the old.I gave up fire for form till I was cold.

[The] erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardised citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

A man becomes the creature of his uniform.

We see young men who owe us a new world, so readily and lavishly they promise, but they never acquit the debt; they die young anddodge the account: or if they live, they lose themselves in the crowd.

Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.

The American has dwindled into an Odd Fellow,-one who may be known by the development of his organ of gregariousness.

Normality is a fine ideal for those who have no imagination.

The man who does not wish to be one of the mass only needs to cease to be easy on himself.

We arrange our lives-even the best and boldest men and women that exist, just as much as the most limited-with reference to what society conventionally rules and makes right.

"A minority of one"... the definition of insanity.

The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: it's one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him... One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them.

I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward.Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife.

The world will ask you who you are, and if you don't know, the world will tell you.

He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

Those that achieve anything that looks beyond the vision and thinking of their peers provoke jealousy and hatred disguised as the ordinary.

Meek young men grow up in colleges and believe it is their duty to accept the views which books have given, and grow up slaves.

It is but too easy to establish another durable and harmonious routine. Immediately all parts of nature consent to it. Only make something to take the place of something, and men will behave as if it was the very thing they wanted.

What sense or thought do they have? They follow the popular singers, and they take the crowd as their teacher.

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.

He didn't call his father and mother 'Father' and 'Mother' but Harold and Alberta. They were very up to date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotalers, and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on the beds and the windows were always open.

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

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

Altogether too many sheep

We teach them to take their patriotism at second-hand; to shout with the largest crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter -- exactly as boys under monarchies are taught and have always been taught. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of place -- the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else's keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan.

In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense.

We should know mankind better if we were not so anxious to resemble one another.

I find nothing healthful or exalting in the smooth conventions of society. I do not like the close air of saloons. I begin to suspect myself to be a prisoner, though treated with all this courtesy and luxury. I pay a destructive tax in my conformity.

Now, the Star-Belly Sneetches had bellies with stars. The Plain-Belly Sneetches had none upon thars.

Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man.

...most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right.

The individual has always to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.

And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.

The fashion of the world is to avoid cost, and you encounter it.

There's a big difference between oneness and sameness. Oneness implies that we're all connected and that we all come from the same source. Sameness implies that we all have to do things and exactly think the same way as everybody else does.

Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.

Conformity will be the only virtue and any man who refuses to conform will have to pay the penalty.

The best of us would rather be popular than right.

They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening

A man is called affected, nowadays, if he dresses as he likes to dress. But in doing that he is acting in a perfectly natural manner. Affectation, in such matters, consists in dressing according to the views of one's neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of the majority, will probably be extremely stupid.

But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is one of knowing whether two and two do make four

Obviously, there are people who constrict themselves and build walls around themselves, whether it's from a moral standpoint or a patriotic standpoint, or just plain old conformity, and who therefore live in those little prisons, and when things breach those walls, it's shocking for them.

The more you are like yourself, the less you are like anyone else which makes you unique. The problem with most people is that they spend their lives trying to emulate others and so we have lots of copies but few originals.

By the time you rise through the ranks, the culture of homogenization has bred the spirit and imagination out of you.

You had better be a round peg in a square hole than a square peg in a square hole. The latter is in for life, while the first is only an indeterminate sentence.

It's more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy. On the importance of loving what you do.

What is wanted - whether this is admitted or not - is nothing less than a fundamental remolding, indeed weakening and abolition of the individual: one never tires of enumerating and indicating all that is evil and inimical, prodigal, costly, extravagant in the form individual existence has assumed hitherto, one hopes to manage more cheaply, more safely, more equitably, more uniformly if there exist only large bodies and their members.

Only the self-sufficient stand alone - most people follow the crowd and imitate.

Remember, Montag, we're the happiness boys. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought.

Society is frivolous, and shreds its day into scraps, its conversation into ceremonies and escapes.

Conformity is the ape of harmony.

The first opinion that occurs to us when we are suddenly asked about something is usually not our own but only the current one pertaining to our class, position, or parentage; our own opinions seldom swim on the surface.

If you are influenced by the opinions of others, you will have no DESIRE of your own.

The man that walks wit crowd, will get no farther than the crowd. The man that walks alone, will reach places unknown.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

If it requires a uniform, it's a worthless endeavor.

Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.