Conformity Quotations
Authors that have more than 2 quotes:
Albert Einstein,
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
George Bernard Shaw,
Mark Twain
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| Yield to all and you will soon have nothing to yield. |
| - Aesop |
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| Before you can break out of prison, you must first realize you're locked up. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| Don't think you're on the right road just because it’s a well-beaten path. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| If you keep doing things like you've always done them, what you'll get is what you've already got. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| Most people are more comfortable with old problems than with new solutions. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| One who walks in another's tracks leaves no footprints. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea. |
| - Walter Bagehot |
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| Public opinion... requires us to think other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits. |
| - Walter Bagehot |
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| You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind-legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men. |
| - Max Beerbohm |
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| Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago. |
| - Bernard Berenson |
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| We submit to the majority because we have to. But we are not compelled to call our attitude of subjection a posture of respect. |
| - Ambrose Bierce |
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| The reward for conformity was that everyone liked you except yourself. |
| - Rita Mae Brown |
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| There are some men who turn a deaf ear to reason and good advice, and willfully go wrong for fear of being controlled. |
| - Jean de La Bruyère |
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| Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it - even if I have said it - unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense. |
| - Buddha |
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| The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered. |
| - Samuel Butler |
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| I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones. |
| - John Cage |
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| Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal. |
| - Albert Camus |
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| I merely observe that all living things are manipulated. As long as there is a will, it is bent and twisted constantly. Only the dead are allowed the luxury of freedom, and then only because they want nothing, and therefore can't be thwarted. |
| - Orson Scott Card |
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| At the bottom of a good deal of bravery... lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they cannot face public opinion. |
| - Edwin Hubbel Chapin |
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| Nature made us individuals, as she did the flowers and the pebbles; but we are afraid to be peculiar, and so our society resembles a bag of marbles, or a string of mold candles. Why should we all dress after the same fashion? The frost never paints my windows twice alike. |
| - Lydia Maria Child |
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| You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. |
| - Sir Winston Churchill |
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| Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are. |
| - Quentin Crisp |
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| Common experience shows how much rarer is moral courage than physical bravery. A thousand men will march to the mouth of the cannon where one man will dare espouse an unpopular cause. |
| - Clarence Darrow |
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| Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt. |
| - Clarence Darrow |
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| Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary. |
| - Albert Einstein |
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| He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. |
| - Albert Einstein |
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| The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them. |
| - Albert Einstein |
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| Here in America we are descended in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. |
| - Dwight D. Eisenhower |
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| Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail. |
| - Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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| A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist. |
| - Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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| It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. |
| - Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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| No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors. |
| - William Faulkner |
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| If you do not agree with the prevalent point of view, be ready to explain why. |
| - Martin H. Fischer |
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| Minorities are the stars of the firmament; majorities, the darkness in which they float. |
| - Martin H. Fischer |
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| What this country needs is radicals who will stay that way regardless of the creeping years. |
| - John Fischer |
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| We must not overlook the role that extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent. |
| - Abraham Flexner |
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| If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. |
| - Anatole France |
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| The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking. |
| - John Kenneth Galbraith |
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| History does not teach fatalism. There are moments when the will of a handful of free men breaks through determinism and opens up new roads. People get the history they deserve. |
| - Charles de Gaulle |
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| None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. |
| - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
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| Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model. |
| - Vincent van Gogh |
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| Those who stand for nothing fall for anything. |
| - Alexander Hamilton |
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| If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it. |
| - S.I. Hayakawa |
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| I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions. |
| - Lillian Hellman |
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| If you obey all the rules you miss all the fun. |
| - Katharine Hepburn |
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| When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other. |
| - Eric Hoffer |
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| Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or that our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than we suspect of what we think. |
| - Oliver Wendell, Jr. Holmes |
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| Every man is a reformer until reform tramps on his toes. |
| - Edgar Watson Howe |
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| Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one. |
| - Elbert Hubbard |
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| When some folks agree with my opinions I begin to suspect I'm wrong. |
| - Kin Hubbard |
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| Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead. |
| - Aldous Huxley |
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| The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone. |
| - Henrik Ibsen |
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| Custom meets us at the cradle and leaves us only at the tomb. |
| - Robert Greene Ingersoll |
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| Mental slavery is mental death, and every man who has given up his intellectual freedom is the living coffin of his dead soul. |
| - Robert Greene Ingersoll |
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| Just because something is tradition doesn't make it right. |
| - Anthony J. D'Angelo |
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| Conformity is that jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth. |
| - John F. Kennedy |
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| I guess I've spent my life listening to what wasn't being said. |
| - Eli Khamarov |
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| Unless one decorates one's house for oneself alone, best leave it bare, for other people are walleyed. |
| - D.H. Lawrence |
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| New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common. |
| - John Locke |
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| With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance. |
| - Norman Mailer |
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| False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing. |
| - Joseph De Maistre |
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| I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members. |
| - Groucho Marx |
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| I'm not sure I want popular opinion on my side - I've noticed those with the most opinions often have the fewest facts. |
| - Bethania McKenstry |
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| Every society honors its live conformists, and its dead troublemakers. |
| - Mignon McLaughlin |
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| Traditions are group efforts to keep the unexpected from happening. |
| - Mignon McLaughlin |
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| I don't necessarily agree with everything I say. |
| - Marshall McLuhan |
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| It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. |
| - Herman Melville |
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| 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. |
| - Henry Louis Mencken |
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| The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful, is the cause of half their errors. |
| - John Stuart Mill |
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| Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was. |
| - Margaret Mitchell |
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| I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education. |
| - Wilson Mizner |
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| I believe more follies are committed out of complaisance to the world, than in following our own inclinations. |
| - Mary Wortley Montagu |
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| Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity. |
| - Christopher Morley |
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| Only dead fish swim with the stream. |
| - Malcolm Muggeridge |
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| How glorious it is - and also how painful - to be an exception. |
| - Alfred de Musset |
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| The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. |
| - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche |
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| 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. |
| - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche |
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| Ain't no man can avoid being average, but there ain't no man got to be common. |
| - Satchel Paige |
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| If everyone is thinking alike then somebody isn't thinking. |
| - George S. Patton |
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| I am not in this world to live up to other people's expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine. |
| - Fritz Perls |
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| They will say that you are on the wrong road, if it is your own. |
| - Antonio Porchia |
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| One dog barks at something, and a hundred bark at the bark. |
| - Chinese Proverb |
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| If you believe everything you read, you better not read. |
| - Japanese Proverb |
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| Fashion is more powerful than any tyrant. |
| - Latin Proverb |
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| The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive - a definition that invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society - a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself.... The purpose of man's life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question. |
| - Ayn Rand |
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| Every man who is truly a man must learn to be alone in the midst of all the others, and if need be against all the others. |
| - Romain Rolland |
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| In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted. |
| - Bertrand Russell |
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| Never assume the obvious is true. |
| - William Safire |
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| Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us - and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along. |
| - Carl Sagan |
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| The marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading "Keep Off." |
| - Carl Sandburg |
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| Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions. |
| - George Santayana |
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| Every man prefers belief to the exercise of judgment. |
| - Lucius Annaeus Seneca |
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| Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. |
| - Dr. Seuss |
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| The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. |
| - George Bernard Shaw |
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| Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity; and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom. |
| - George Bernard Shaw |
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| Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature. |
| - George Bernard Shaw |
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| Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. |
| - George Bernard Shaw |
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| The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them. |
| - George Bernard Shaw |
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| The number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves is very small indeed. |
| - Richard Brinsley Sheridan |
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| I am not eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish. |
| - Dame Edith Sitwell |
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| You cannot be both fashionable and first-rate. |
| - Logan Pearsall Smith |
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| All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions. |
| - Adlai E. Stevenson |
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| When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him. |
| - Jonathan Swift |
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| The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, monomedicine. The belief that there is only one right way to live, only one right way to regulate religious, political, sexual, medical affairs is the root cause of the greatest threat to man: members of his own species, bent on ensuring his salvation, security, and sanity. |
| - Thomas Szasz |
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| Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. |
| - Henry David Thoreau |
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| Not all those who wander are lost. |
| - J.R.R. Tolkien |
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| Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul. |
| - Mark Twain |
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| We all live in the protection of certain cowardices which we call our principles. |
| - Mark Twain |
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| Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. |
| - Mark Twain |
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| If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standards of nonconformity. |
| - Bill Vaughan |
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| I try not to break the rules, but merely to test their elasticity. |
| - Bill Veeck |
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| Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road. |
| - Voltaire |
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| We are half ruined by conformity; but we should be wholly ruined without it. |
| - Charles Dudley Warner |
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| From now on, I'll connect the dots my own way. |
| - Bill Watterson |
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| Heresies are experiments in man's unsatisfied search for truth. |
| - H.G. Wells |
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| Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking. |
| - Alfred North Whitehead |
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| The eager and often inconsiderate appeals of reformers and revolutionists are indispensable to counterbalance the inertia and fossilism marking so large a part of human institutions. |
| - Walt Whitman |
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| The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain. |
| - Colin Wilson |
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| But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip service to their authority that we become sometimes most keenly conscious that we do not believe a word that we are saying. |
| - Virginia Woolf |
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| Habit rules the unreflecting herd. |
| - William Wordsworth |
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