Quotes about conformity

The opposite of bravery is not cowardice but conformity.

— Dr. Robert Anthony

The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.

— James Baldwin

Take the tone of the company you are in.

— Lord Chesterfield

Conform and be dull.

— J. Frank Doble

For all have not the gift of martyrdom.

— John Dryden

It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.

— Albert Einstein

One lesson we learn early, that in spite of seeming difference, men are all of one pattern. We readily assume this with our mates, and are disappointed and angry if we find that we are premature, and that their watches are slower than ours. In fact, the only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Singularity in the right hath ruined many; happy those who are convinced of the general opinion.

— Benjamin Franklin

I was part of that strange race of people aptly described as spending their lives doing things they detest to make money they don't want to buy things they don't need to impress people they dislike.

— Emile Henry Gauvreau

Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.

— Eric Hoffer

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

— John F. Kennedy

Conformity, humility, acceptance... with these coins we are to pay our fares to paradise.

— Robert Lindner

Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.

— Mignon McLaughlin

The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.

— Marshall Mcluhan

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

To do exactly as your neighbors do is the only sensible rule.

— Emily Post

The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.

— David Riesman

We are citizens of an age, as well as of a State; and if it is held to be unseemly, or even inadmissible, for a man to cut himself off from the customs and manners of the circle in which he lives, why should it be less of a duty, in the choice of his activity, to submit his decision to the needs and the taste of his century?

— Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

As to conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I have not a very high opinion of that course.

— Henry David Thoreau

Why do you have to a nonconformist like everybody else?

— James Thurber

I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.

— Alexis De Tocqueville

Most people can't understand how others can blow their noses differently than they do.

— Ivan Turgenev

Fear God, and offend not the Prince nor his laws, and keep thyself out of the magistrate's claws.

— Thomas Tusser

We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove.

— Mark Twain

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.

— Voltaire

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.

— Virginia Woolf