48 Quotes On Conformity

In a world that often celebrates individuality, the concept of conformity remains a fascinating and complex subject. It is the fine line between fitting in and standing out, between the safety of the herd and the courage of the singular path. Conformity can be seen as a social glue that binds communities together, yet it can also stifle innovation and personal growth. In exploring the intricate dynamics of conformity, one can uncover the tensions between societal expectations and personal authenticity. To illuminate these themes, we present a thoughtfully curated collection of 48 quotes on conformity, offering insights from a diverse range of thinkers. Their observations invite us to reflect on how conformity shapes our lives and challenges us to consider when to embrace it and when to resist it in pursuit of our true selves.

1. “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

2. “Any fool can make a ruleAnd any fool will mind it.” - Henry David Thoreau

3. “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” - J. Krishnamurti

4. “make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty.” - Jon Krakauer

5. “The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.” - John Kenneth Galbraith

6. “He who joyfully marches to music rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.” - Albert Einstein

7. “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. ” - Thomas Szasz

8. “Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.” - W. Somerset Maugham

9. “If you stand up and be counted, from time to time you may get yourself knocked down. But remember this: A man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good.” - Thomas J. Watson

10. “It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations -- past and present -- are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millenia.” - Eric Hoffer

11. “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!” - Alfred De Musset

12. “At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet.” - Seth Godin

13. “Whatever question arose, a swarm of these drones, without having finished their buzzing on a previous theme, flew over to the new one and by their hum drowned and obscured the voices of those who were disputing honestly.” - Leo Tolstoy

14. “One can often recognize herd animals by their tendency to carry bibles.” - Allen Wheelis

15. “A prison becomes a home when you have the key.” - George Sterling

16. “All the heroes of tomorrow are the heretics of today.” - Yip Harburg

17. “A soft and sheltered Christianity, afraid to be lean and lone, unwilling to face the storms and brave the heights, will end up fat and foul in the cages of conformity.” - Vance Havner

18. “perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.” - Salman Rushdie

19. “Rebel children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory.” - Russell Brand

20. “If New Orleans is not fully in the mainstream of culture, neither is it fully in the mainstream of time. Lacking a well-defined present, it lives somewhere between its past and its future, as if uncertain whether to advance or to retreat. Perhaps it is its perpetual ambivalence that is its secret charm. Somewhere between Preservation Hall and the Superdome, between voodoo and cybernetics, New Orleans listens eagerly to the seductive promises of the future but keeps at least one foot firmly planted in its history, and in the end, conforms, like an artist, not to the world but to its own inner being--ever mindful of its personal style.” - Tom Robbins

21. “It is when we think we can act like God, that all respect is lost, and I think this is the downfall of peace. We lie if we say we do not see color and culture and difference. We fool ourselves and cheat ourselves when we say that all of us are the same. We should not want to be the same as others and we should not want others to be the same as us. Rather, we ought to glory and shine in all of our differences, flaunting them fabulously for all to see! It is never a conformity that we need! We need not to conform! What we need is to burst out into all these beautiful colors!” - C. JoyBell C.

22. “What puzzled me was why I seemed to be so troubled by all these irregularities and exceptions to major rules while others blithely marched ahead.” - Catherine Gildiner

23. “No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

24. “It's weird not to be weird.” - John Lennon

25. “The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains.” - Henry David Thoreau

26. “How could you tell how much of it was lies? It might be true that the average human being was better off now than before the Revolution. The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different. It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve. Great areas of it, even for a party member, were neutral and nonpolitical, a matter of slogging through dreary jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube, darning a worn-out sock, cadging a saccharine tablet, saving a cigarette end. The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering--a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons--a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting--three hundred million people all with the same face.” - George Orwell

27. “Sophistication is upscale conformity.” - James Richardson

28. “I would rather be an artist than a leader. Ironically, a leader has to follow the rules.” - Criss Jami

29. “Any fool can do something cool and look cool, but it takes skill to make something uncool cool again.” - Criss Jami

30. “Joining a sub-culture, any sub-culture, for whatever reason, is as I see it never a legitimate self-expression. It is always a result of sheep mentality; a wish to belong somewhere.” - Varg Vikernes

31. “Conformity—the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority.” - Mark Twain

32. “We are not here to match and homogenize and agree on every point. One size of spirituality does not fit all. We are here to be our divine selves, boldly, passionately, respectfully, to the absolute best of our ability — and this, this is more than enough.” - sera break

33. “There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.” - Fernando Pessoa

34. “It's time for a new National Anthem. America is divided into two definite divisions. The easy thing to cop out with is sayin' black and white. You can see a black person. But now to get down to the nitty-gritty, it's getting' to be old and young - not the age, but the way of thinking. Old and new, actually... because there's so many even older people that took half their lives to reach a certain point that little kids understand now.” - Jimi Hendrix

35. “What editors are obliged to appear to say that men want from women is actually what their advertisers want from women.” - Naomi Wolf

36. “We all know that any emotional bias -- irrespective of truth or falsity -- can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value.... If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction.” - H.P. Lovecraft

37. “The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.” - H.L. Mencken

38. “It was a bland, tranquilized, life-adjusted, group-integrated sort of face -- the face turned out in thousands of copies every year by the educational production lines on Terra.” - H. Beam Piper

39. “The problem with this generation is they are so quick to define who they are in the process of searching. It is their need for immediate acceptance that keeps them from exploring further.” - Shannon Alder

40. “The societies kids naturally form are tribal. Gangs, clubs, packs. But we're herded into schools and terrified into behaving. Taught how we're supposed to pretend to be, taught to parrot all kinds of nonsense at the flick of a switch, taught to keep our heads down and our elbows in and shut off our minds and shut off our sex. We learn we can't even piss when we have to. That's how we learn to be plastic and dumb.” - Marge Piercy

41. “Modern capitalism needs men who co-operate smoothly, and in large numbers; who want to consume more and more; and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated. It needs men who feel free and independent, not subject to any authority or principle or conscience—yet willing to be commanded, to do what is expected of them, to fit into the social machine without friction; who can be guided without force, led without leaders, prompted without aim—except the one to make good, to be on the move, to function, to go ahead. What is the outcome? Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature.” - Erich Fromm

42. “We are not supposed to all be the same, feel the same, think the same, and believe the same. The key to continued expansion of our Universe lies in diversity, not in conformity and coercion. Conventionality is the death of creation.” - Anthon St. Maarten

43. “If you are always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be.” - Maya Angelou

44. “It then becomes necessary to stop short and make a choice: Either/Or. Either one drifts with their absurd system of ideas, believing that this is the human community. Or one dissents totally from their system of ideas and stands as a lonely human being. (But luckily one notices that the others are in the same crisis and making the same choices.)” - Paul Goodman

45. “The common person fears to think beyond the common.” - Bryant McGill

46. “It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!” - Henry David Thoreau

47. “I like weird. Conformity bores but is inescapable for the most part. We all follow something, even if it is following the goal of wanting to stand apart. We are a sea of ordinary people; it is always the quirk, the flaw or the ingenuity that stands out.” - Donna Lynn Hope

48. “We're all teased or pressured into conforming to the all-levelling social norms of mediocrity.” - H.M. Forester