Quotes on conformity
I feel like a fugitive from the law of averages.
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William H. Mauldin Quotes
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
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Mark Twain Quotes
The number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves is very small indeed.
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Richard Brinsley Sheridan Quotes
I believe more follies are committed out of complaisance to the world, than in following our own inclinations.
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Mary Wortley Montagu Quotes
When some folks agree with my opinions I begin to suspect I'm wrong.
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Frank McKinney Hubbard Quotes
They will say that you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.
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Antonio Porchia Quotes
We must not overlook the role that extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent.
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Abraham Flexner Quotes
And who can doubt that it will lead to the worst disorders when minds created free by God are compelled to submit slavishly to an outside will? When we are told to deny our senses and subject them to the will of others?
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Galileo Galilei Quotes
Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
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Mark Twain Quotes
If everyone is thinking alike then somebody isn't thinking.
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George S. Patton Quotes
I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.
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Lillian Hellman Quotes
My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking for others! My manner of thinking stems straight from my considered reflections; it holds with my existence, with the way I am made. It is not in my power to alter it; and were it, I'd not do so.
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Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade Quotes
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.
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Dame Edith Sitwell Quotes
Every society honors its live conformists, and its dead troublemakers.
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Mignon McLaughlin Quotes
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.
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Walt Whitman Quotes
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.
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Albert Einstein Quotes
The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well.
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Foe Ancis Quotes
Every man is a reformer until reform tramps on his toes.
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Edgar Watson Howe Quotes
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.
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Voltaire Quotes
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.
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Max Beerbohm Quotes
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
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Albert Camus Quotes
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.
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E.H. Chapin Quotes
Stubborness does have its helpful features. You always know what you are going to be thinking tomorrow.
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Glen Beaman Quotes
You don't get harmony when everybody sings the same note.
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Doug Floyd Quotes
Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.
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Quentin Crisp Quotes
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
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Eric Hoffer Quotes
Ain't no man can avoid being average, but there ain't no man got to be common.
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Satchel Paige Quotes
I guess I've spent my life listening to what wasn't being said.
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Eli Khamarov Quotes
If you keep doing things like you've always done them, what you'll get is what you've already got.
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Author Unknown Quotes
All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.
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Adlai E. Stevenson Quotes
The reward for conformity was that everyone liked you except yourself.
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Rita Mae Brown Quotes
Human beings, for all their pretensions, have a remarkable propensity for lending themselves to classification somewhere within neatly labeled categories. Even the outrageous exceptions may be classified as outrageous exceptions!
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W.J. Reichmann Quotes
Never accept the proposition that just because a solution satisfies a problem, that it must be the only solution.
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Raymond E. Feist Quotes
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.
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Charles de Gaulle Quotes
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.
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Albert Einstein Quotes
Conformity is that jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.
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John F. Kennedy Quotes
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
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George Bernard Shaw Quotes
What this country needs is radicals who will stay that way regardless of the creeping years.
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John Fischer Quotes
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.
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Buddha Quotes
A "Normal" person is the sort of person that might be designed by a committee. You know, "Each person puts in a pretty color and it comes out gray."
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Alan Sherman Quotes
If you don't control your mind, someone else will.
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John Allston Quotes
I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.
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John Cage Quotes
Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was.
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Margaret Mitchell Quotes
It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
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Herman Melville Quotes
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.
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George Bernard Shaw Quotes
Unless one decorates one's house for oneself alone, best leave it bare, for other people are walleyed.
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D.H. Lawrence Quotes
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.
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Dr. Seuss Quotes
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.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
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Anatole France Quotes
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.
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Joseph De Maistre Quotes
Before you can break out of prison, you must first realize you're locked up.
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Author Unknown Quotes
I don't rent space to anyone in my head.
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Anonymous Quotes
Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.
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Vincent Van Gogh Quotes
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.
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Bill Vaughan Quotes
Yield to all and you will soon have nothing to yield.
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Aesop Quotes
We submit to the majority because we have to. But we are not compelled to call our attitude of subjection a posture of respect.
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Ambrose Bierce Quotes
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.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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.
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Clarence Darrow Quotes
Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.
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Clarence Darrow Quotes
Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature.
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George Bernard Shaw Quotes
Heresies are experiments in man's unsatisfied search for truth.
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H.G. Wells Quotes
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.
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H.L. Mencken Quotes
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.
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Christopher Morley Quotes
Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity; and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom.
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George Bernard Shaw Quotes
If you want to look like the people next door, you're probably smothering yourself and your dreams.
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Clive Barker Quotes
There are some men who turn a deaf ear to reason and good advice, and willfully go wrong for fear of being controlled.
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La Bruyère Quotes
One who walks in another's tracks leaves no footprints.
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Proverb Quotes
The marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading "Keep Off."
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Carl Sandburg Quotes
It's a rash man who reaches a conclusion before he gets to it.
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Jacob Levin Quotes
From now on, I'll connect the dots my own way.
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Bill Watterson Quotes
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.
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Orson Scott Card Quotes
No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.
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William Faulkner Quotes
Be neither a conformist or a rebel, for they are really the same thing. Find your own path, and stay on it.
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Paul Vixie Quotes
Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
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Bernard Berenson Quotes
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.
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Winston Churchill Quotes
When I was four years old they tried to test my IQ, they showed me this picture of three oranges and a pear. They asked me which one is different and does not belong, they taught me different was wrong.
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Ani Difranco Quotes
Here in America we are descended in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine.
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Dwight D. Eisenhower Quotes
Men will sooner surrender their rights than their customs.
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Moritz Guedemann Quotes
I had an immense advantage over many others dealing with the problem inasmuch as I had no fixed ideas derived from long-established practice to control and bias my mind, and did not suffer from the general belief that whatever is, is right.
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Henry Bessemer Quotes
You laugh at me because I am different; I laugh because you are all the same.
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Daniel Knode Quotes
The fastest way to succeed is to look as if you're playing by other people's rules, while quietly playing by your own.
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Michael Korda Quotes
I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.
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Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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.
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Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
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.
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Fritz Perls Quotes
One dog barks at something, and a hundred bark at the bark.
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Chinese Proverb Quotes
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.
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Carl Sagan Quotes
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking.
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Alfred North Whitehead Quotes
The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.
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Colin Wilson Quotes
Habit rules the unreflecting herd.
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William Wordsworth Quotes