conformity quotes

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

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.

To hard necessity ones will and fancy must conform.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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