A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person, because he conforms to a pattern; he repeats phrases and thinks in a groove.

That is never too often repeated, which is never sufficiently learned.

Most people are happy being average. Most are happy being faceless in a sea of faces.

The first time you say something, it’s heard. The second time, it’s recognized, and the third time it’s learned.

Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.

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

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

Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

When you’re just like everybody else, you’ve nothing to offer other than your conformity.

You should do what other people do, unless you have a very good reason not to.

We cannot expect that all nations will adopt like systems, for conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

Consciously or unconsciously most of us adhere to what is expected of our role because we realize our social success depends on this. Some may refuse to play this game, but in the end they are marginalized and forced to play the outsider role, with limited options and decreasing freedom as they get older.

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.

It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around.

Since the child knew his parents would give in, he tried the same trick again and again.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

Every utopia – let’s just stick with the literary ones – faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?

The Heads were the only band on that scene that had a groove.

We are so conformist; nobody is thinking. We are all sucking up stuff; we have been trained to be consumers, and we are all consuming far too much.

Why does your mind conform? Have you ever asked? Are you aware that you are conforming to a pattern? It doesn’t matter what that pattern is, whether you have established a pattern for yourself or it has been established for you.

There is no harm in repeating a good thing.

Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.

Throughout my years in business, I discovered something. I would always ask why you do things. The answers that I would invariably get are: ‚Oh, that’s just the way things are done around here.‘ Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks very deeply about things in business.

You listen to the radio and all the songs sound the same, from 8 in the morning to 12.

You may be educated abroad, you may be a great scientist, politician, but you always have a sneaking fear that if you don’t go to temples or do the ordinary things that you have been told to do, something evil might happen, so you conform. What happens to the mind that conforms? Investigate it, please.

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

The last proceeding of reason is to recognize that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it. There is nothing so conformable to reason as this disavowal of reason.

Understand: as children and young adults, we are taught to conform to certain codes of behavior and ways of doing things. We learn that being different comes with a social price.

Nothing is as approved as mediocrity, the majority has established it and it fixes its fangs on whatever gets beyond it either way.

Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion.

Any idea, plan, or purpose may be placed in the mind through repetition of thought.

Dusting is a good example of the futility of trying to put things right. As soon as you dust, the fact of your next dusting has already been established.

When I tell a child something the first time, I’m nice. The 15th time, I start to get aggravated.

People are so caught in a routine, doing the same things over and over.

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.

I’m gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we’re not being controlled, we’ll just do what we want.

To hard necessity ones will and fancy must conform.

Of course, like anybody I repeat myself endlessly, but I don’t know that I’m doing it, usually.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects.

To Sun-tzu and the ancient Chinese, doing something extraordinary had little effect without a setup of something ordinary. You had to mix the two – to fix your opponent’s expectations with some banal, ordinary maneuver, a comfortable pattern that they would then expect you to follow.

We are second-hand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences, and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves: nothing original, pristine, clear.

I can’t see myself singing the same song twice in a row. That’s terrible.

Of course it’s the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.

I remember straightening my hair because I wanted to be like everybody else, and now the fact that anybody would emulate what I do? It’s just funny.

‚No comment‘ is a splendid expression. I am using it again and again.

If you’ve heard this story before, don’t stop me, because I’d like to hear it again.

While children are struggling to be unique, the world around them is trying all means to make them look like everybody else.

Man as an individual is a genius. But men in the mass form the headless monster, a great, brutish idiot that goes where prodded.

It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make their appearance in the world.

No, I will be the pattern of all patience; I will say nothing.

In order to be an immaculate member of a flock of sheep, one must above all be a sheep oneself.

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.

Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.

When you put on a uniform, there are certain inhibitions that you accept.

Twice and thrice over, as they say, good is it to repeat and review what is good.

The respected intellectuals are those who conform and serve power interests.