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.

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

The unsaid rule for living in a trailer park is: ‚If the door’s shut, don’t come a-knockin.‘ But if it’s open and you’re walkin‘ by, feel free to say, ‚Hello.‘

If the standard transsexual person wants to be regarded as he or she, my sense is I’ll address you according to the part that you appear to be playing.

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

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.

Hermits have no peer pressure.

I’m a woman, and anytime you tell a woman that she looks nice, it’s not going to upset her.

Where I come from it was really unheard of to be at a party and someone says, ‚What kind of music do you make?‘, and you say, ‚Pop music.‘ You may as well have ‚I’m not cool‘ stamped on your forehead.

No people is wholly civilized where a distinction is drawn between stealing an office and stealing a purse.

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

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.

Men weren’t always happy for me. It was very challenging to watch a woman be so successful.

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

What is the appropriate behavior for a man or a woman in the midst of this world, where each person is clinging to his piece of debris? What’s the proper salutation between people as they pass each other in this flood?

It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims.

People like me were supposed to be into exclusivity, unapproachable. That’s what I hate most. I think it’s very demode.

My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication – it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness – it is all that I have – and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.

It’s very strange to go to cities like London and New York. People walk so quickly, they seem to be in a hurry all the time. And you don’t say ‚Hi‘ to everyone you meet, and you don’t smile to everyone you meet, because there’s just so many. Which is also very strange.

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

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

People who eat with their mouth open should be punched in the face.

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.

For how many things, which for our own sake we should never do, do we perform for the sake of our friends.

To hard necessity ones will and fancy must conform.

It’s considered acceptable in our culture to approach perfect strangers, as often or not who may be in extremis, and evangelise. I don’t see why that’s considered a normal thing.

Let’s face it. No kid in high school feels as though they fit in.

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

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.

I was a very shy character, always feeling uncomfortable because everybody was stronger than I, and always afraid I would look like a sissy. Everybody else played baseball; everybody else did all kinds of athletic things.

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

Well, they’re Southern people, and if they know you are working at home they think nothing of walking right in for coffee. But they wouldn’t dream of interrupting you at golf.

The moral disapprobation of society has an impact on behavior in societies.

You aren’t normal if you sing to people. You aren’t a normal person. It’s nerve-racking.

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.

Genteel women suppose that those things do not really exist about which it is impossible to talk in polite company.

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.

Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent.

If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? – not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?

All cultures have these feelings about non-functional areas of activity. And the more time people have on their hands, the more they commit it to those areas.

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.

We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.

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.

It’s vulgar, coming from where I do, to talk about money.

Like religion, politics, and family planning, cereal is not a topic to be brought up in public. It’s too controversial.

The English don’t like concepts, really, not from a pop star. It’s alright if they come from an ‚intellectual,‘, but from a pop star you’re getting ahead of yourself. Part of the class game is that you shouldn’t rise above your station, and to start talking about concepts if you’re in the pop world is getting a bit uppity, isn’t it?

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

I didn’t just invent saying offensive things.

Chastity – the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

It is impossible, in our condition of Society, not to be sometimes a Snob.

I don’t eat with beautiful women alone.

You know, you can make a small mistake in language or etiquette in Britain, or you could when I was younger, and really be made to feel it, and it’s the flick of a lash, but it would sting, and especially at school where there’s not much privacy, and so on. You could, yes, undoubtedly be made to feel crushed.

There are many times when a woman will ask another girl friend how she likes her new hat. She will reply, ‚Fine,‘ but slap her hand to her forehead the minute the girl leaves to yipe, ‚What a horror!‘

My message isn’t perfectly defined. I have, as a human being, fallen to peer pressure.

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.

Somewhere it is written that parents who are critical of other people’s children and publicly admit they can do better are asking for it.

I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird.

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

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