Conformity Quotes

The human spirit lives on creativity and dies in conformity and routine.

If you conform, you can never reform.

I just know Maycomb. I'm not in the least sensitive about it, but good Lord, I'm certainly aware of it.

To conform is to be average.

When we heed God's Word, we are rejecting how the world tries to disciple us.

If a man does not keep pace with hiscompanions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Lethim step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple-tree oran oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer?

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

Plants are more courageous than almost all human beings: an orange tree would rather die than produce lemons, whereas instead of dying the average person would rather be someone they are not.

Never rebel for the sake of rebelling, but always rebel for the sake of truth.

God never uses one approach to the get his job done in the world. Each soul has its own way of being reached. He has put inside of each of us an unique song, that only another heart can hear clearly. To wish you were someone else robs another human being of the special blessings, talents and gifts God meant for you to share.

When spontaneity and individuality and really good original stuff occurred in a classroom it was in spite of the instruction, not because of it. This seemed to make sense. He was ready to resign. Teaching dull conformity to hateful students wasn’t what he wanted to do.

To think freely--you and only you can liberate yourself from the conformity of your society.

One of the greatest regrets in life is being what others would want you to be, rather than being yourself.

I realized that we all have the ability to live in worlds of our own doing, to own what happens to us, and to shape our inner worlds with such a positive force that our outer worlds have no other choice but to conform.

when you obey the rules, the rules obey you

Today, one must either be isolated and cut off, or a carefully guarded, affluent drop-out, to allow one's children to play in an environment where they listen to people rather than to stars, speakers, or instructors. All over the world, one can see the rapid encroachment of the disciplined acquiescence that characterizes the audience, the client, the customer.

When critics surrender to the prevailing orthodoxy, the author says they adopt the rhetoric of an occupied country, "one that expects no liberation from liberation.

Think about the word mould for a moment. A mould is a device into which one crams and smashes something until it becomes the shape that they desire. Don't spend your life letting other people destroy you while they try and force you into their moulds.

We are the anarchists your parents warned you about.

We are the prisoners of conformity. To get out of this prison, education is the only door and only opportunity.

Some people respect some people only because some people respect them.

Normal people are just freaks who are afraid to be themselves in public.

I would rather be an artist than a leader. Ironically, a leader has to follow the rules.

The uncertainties in life are so uncertain for us to determine the kind woe we shall be entangled in in the next future. When you stay dormant, your life is at risk; when you dare to take a step, you take a step to take a risk. We have a choice. Yes! a choice to choose to dare to get to our real reasons on earth or to choose to live in mediocrity and conformity, but, we ought to note that, it is riskier to risk nothing when the life we live is always at risk.

What I’m starting to realize is that when you conform, people are not accepting you for who you are. They’re accepting you for who they think you are.

Since the war, we're the only intelligent species left in the universe, therefore we think everything in this universe has to conform to our paradigm of what makes sense. Do you have any idea how arrogant that view is and on how little of this universe we base it?

A fair and just society offers equality of opportunity to all. But it cannot promise, and should not try to enforce, sameness.

It is easy to conform, but it takes great courage to stand up for peace.

Alas, everything that men say to one another is alike; the ideas they exchange are almost always the same, in their conversation. But inside all those isolated machines, what hidden recesses, what secret compartments! It is an entire world that each one carries within him, an unknown world that is born and dies in silence! What solitudes all these human bodies are!

Let's make our own way,' says the Mother, 'and not in this boat.

The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. . . . The force of character is cumulative.

Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.... 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.

An artist who conforms to conventional ideas is nothing but a mere charlatan.

We are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them, both immature responses.

There is this common notion that people are shallow and ignorant until they go out and see the world. I, on the other hand, went out and in comparison realized I was in pretty good standing.

Life is, if anything, the art of combination. Of discrimination. Of freely picking one's own personal pattern out of a hundred choices. Not letting it be picked for you—either by the Establishment, or by the Rebels. Conformity of Hip is no better than Conformity of Square.

Curiosity is very important I think, and I think too much of education, starting with childhood education, is either designed to kill curiosity or it works out that way anyway.

When I escape from my cage of conformity, I grow wings to fly in search of truth and beauty.

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.

Most people believe most of the things they believe only because they believe that most people believe them.

The thing I've never understood about dancing till now is that it only looks stupid when you're on the outside, watching other people do it. When you're part of the crowd, moving along with everyone else, I can't imagine anything else being quite as much fun.

Disrobe both conformity and rebellion to find true independence.

A more fundamental problem with labelling human distress and deviance as mental disorder is that it reduces a complex, important, and distinct part of human life to nothing more than a biological illness or defect, not to be processed or understood, or in some cases even embraced, but to be ‘treated’ and ‘cured’ by any means possible—often with drugs that may be doing much more harm than good. This biological reductiveness, along with the stigma that it attracts, shapes the person’s interpretation and experience of his distress or deviance, and, ultimately, his relation to himself, to others, and to the world. Moreover, to call out every difference and deviance as mental disorder is also to circumscribe normality and define sanity, not as tranquillity or possibility, which are the products of the wisdom that is being denied, but as conformity, placidity, and a kind of mediocrity.

Conformity begins the moment you ignore how you feel for acceptance.

You laugh at me because I'm different, I laugh at you because you're all the same.

Opinions of the masses kill the 'extra' in an 'extraordinary' idea.