Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist. — John Taylor Gatto
A free society cherishes nonconformity.
It knows from the non-conformist, from the eccentric,
have come many of the great ideas. — Henry Steele Commager
Life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community. — Sherman Alexie
Be neither a conformist or a rebel, for they are really the same thing. Find your own path, and stay on it. — Paul Vixie
When you're always trying to conform to the norm, you lose your uniqueness, which can be the foundation for your greatness. — Dale Archer
To be a genuine individualist requires a great deal of strength and courage. It is never easy to chart new territory, to cross new frontiers, or to introduce subtle shadings to an established color. — Toller Cranston
You can look different but have the same values. That's not diversity; it's conformity. — Tucker Carlson
When a man becomes a conformist, he is sacrificing the richness of independent thinking. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals. — Aldo Leopold
Individuality will always be one of the conditions of real elegance — Christian Dior
Originality is independence, not rebellion; it is sincerity, not antagonism. — George Henry Lewes
Short Conformity And Individuality Quotes
Imitation is for shirkers, like-minded-ness for the comfort lovers, unifying for the creators. — Mary Parker Follett
Great thoughts are against all doctrines of conformity — Austin Osman Spare
Herd psychology, conformity, capitulation — Howard Marks
To be original, or different, is felt to be "dangerous." — Carl Rogers
One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic. — Robert Musil
Groups cannot grow, unless individuals grow within the group.
Importance Of Individuality Quotes
The key to the Toyota Way and what makes Toyota stand out is not any of the individual elements…But what is important is having all the elements together as a system. It must be practiced every day in a very consistent manner, not in spurts. — Taiichi Ohno
The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team. — Phil Jackson
I remained a socialist for several years, even after my rejection of Marxism; and if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still. For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple, and free life in an egalitarian society. — Karl Popper
No individual raindrop ever consider itself responsible for the flood.
The clown has great importance as part of the search for what is laughable and ridiculous in man. We should put the emphasis on the rediscovery of our own individual clown, the one that has grown-up within us and which society does not allow us to express. — Jacques Lecoq
Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results. — Andrew Carnegie
If you are asking me what the individual can do right now, in a political sense, I'd have to say he can't do all that much. Speaking for myself, I am more concerned with the transformation of the individual, which to me is much more important than the so-called political revolution. — William S. Burroughs
I think the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself.
The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are...There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first. — Jim Morrison
Respect for the fragility and importance of an individual life is still the mark of an educated man. — Norman Cousins
The most important thought that ever occupied my mind is that of my individual responsibility to God. — Daniel Webster
There is much the government can do and should do to improve the environment. But even more important is the individual who plants a tree or cleans a corner of neglect. For it is the individual who himself benefits, and also protects a heritage of beauty for his children and future generations. — Lady Bird Johnson
Conformity Quotes
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds — Paul the Apostle
Do you want to have an easy life? Then always stay with the herd and lose yourself in the herd. — Friedrich Nietzsche
be yourself- not your idea of what you think somebody else's idea of yourself should be. — Henry David Thoreau
Anti-social behavior is a trait of intelligence in a world full of conformists.
dreaming of the person you want to be is wasting the person you already are. — Kurt Cobain
Patterning your life around other's opinions is nothing more than slavery. — Lawana Blackwell
The tendency to conformity in our society is so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black. This is a matter of concern. It raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct. — Solomon Asch
Every individual matters. Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes difference.
Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals, whereas culture has invented a single mold to which all must conform. It is grotesque. — U.G. Krishnamurti
Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic self-hood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks--we will also find our path of authentic service in the world. — Parker J. Palmer
It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we're alive - to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are. — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
So long as men praise you, you can only be sure that you are not yet on your own true path but on someone else's. — Friedrich Nietzsche
The things that make me different are the things that make me. — A. A. Milne
The original American patriots were those individuals brave enough to resist with force the oppressive power of King George... Patriotism is more closely linked to dissent than it is to conformity and a blind desire for safety and security. — Ron Paul
Taking into account the public's regrettable lack of taste, it is incumbent upon you not to fit in. — Janeane Garofalo
Mental slavery is mental death, and every man who has given up his intellectual freedom is the living coffin of his dead soul. — Robert Green Ingersoll
We all live in the protection of certain cowardices which we call our principles. — Mark Twain
Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity, and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom. — George Bernard Shaw
Instead of celebrating what makes each child unique, most parents push their children to "fit in" so that they don't "stick out." This unwittingly stomps out individuality and encourages conformity, despite these parents' good intentions — Tom Rath
If you have your own agenda and your own style and you don't easily conform to what the masses are doing, you're looked upon as being difficult. Whereas, I think of it as just being an individual. — Anita Baker
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. — Walt Whitman
Schoolchildren make up their own rules and enforce their own conformities. They feel safest when leisure time is rationed and dosed. They like to wear uniforms, and they frown on personal idiosyncrasies. Deviance is the mark of an outsider. — Louise J. Kaplan
Our expenses are all for conformity. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Not that I wish by any means to deny, that the mental life of individuals and peoples is also in conformity with law, as is the object of philosophical, philological, historical, moral, and social sciences to establish. — Hermann von Helmholtz
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. — Ani Difranco
... the self respect of individuals ought to make them demand of their leaders conformity with an agreed-upon code of ethics and moral conduct. — Mary Barnett Gilson
The mind is the enemy of intuition, according to many New Age adherents, but I don't buy that. I look at everything in terms of polarities - two ends of the same continuum. Young/old, male/female, individuality/conformity, work/play, freedom/constraint, right/left, day/night, life/death, rational/emotional, and so on. — Shakti Gawain
Society values cooperation over independence, obedience over individuality, and niceness above all else. — Sue Grafton
The sense of community does not arise out of collective movement, nor from conforming to some group direction. Quite the contrary. Each individual tends to use the opportunity to become all that he or she can become. Separateness and diversity - the uniqueness of being "me" - are experienced — Carl Rogers
With the spread of conformity and image-driven superficiality, the allure of an individuated woman in full possession of herself and her powers will prove irresistible. We were born for plenitude and inner fulfillment. — Betsy Prioleau
I think and hope I have changed the way we look at hats. They are no longer symbols of conformity but highly individual acts of rebellion. I am constantly challenging the perception of what a hat should be and what role it should play. — Philip Treacy
I am neither for conformity nor non-conformity. I am for individuality. If one's individuality is in effect non-conformity, then so be it. But basically, one's individuality consists of conformity--to one's self. — Paul Krassner
One of the saddest things about conformity is the ghastly sort of non-conformity it breeds; the noisy protesting, the aggressive rebelliousness, the rigid counter-fetishism. — Louis Kronenberger
In a society of ideological believers, nothing is more ridiculous than the individual who doubts and does not conform. — John Ralston Saul
When a village ceases to be a community, it becomes oppressive in its narrow conformity. So one becomes an individual and migrates to the city. There, finding others like-minded, one re-establishes a village community. Nowadays only New Yorkers are yokels. — Paul Goodman
Fashion in the past meant conforming and losing oneself. Fashion in the present means being individual and finding oneself. — Gloria Steinem
Despite the variety my books reflect my, perhaps foolish, tendency to place artistic above financial concerns; of enjoying the more mature themes in whatever creative form; of being on a mission to show that comics are not just for kids; and on a wider level of standing up for individuality against conformity. — Sean Michael Wilson
Is individual gender suffering relieved at the price of role conformity and the perpetuation of role stereotypes on a social level? In changing sex, does the transsexual encourage a sexist society whose continued existence depends upon the perpetuation of these roles and stereotypes? These and similar questions are seldom raised in transsexual therapy at present. — Janice Raymond
Born originals, how comes it to pass that we die copies? That meddling ape imitation, as soon as we come to years of indiscretion, (so let me speak,) snatches the pen, and blots out nature's mark of separation, cancels her kind intention, destroys all mental individuality. The lettered world no longer consists of singulars: it is a medley, a mass; and a hundred books, at bottom, are but one. — Edward Young
If one has to conform to a certain taste, he/she might lose his/her own individuality and imagination. But if you don't really care about winning competitions and think of them as chances to learn from the experience, they would become good ways to learn about others and yourself. Competitions are also stages where one becomes known to the public. — George Li
Belonging to a group can provide the child with a variety of resources that an individual friendship often cannot--a sense of collective participation, experience with organizational roles, and group support in the enterprise of growing up. Groups also pose for the child some of the most acute problems of social life--of inclusion and exclusion, conformity and independence. — Zick Rubin
You have not yet learned that in this life you have to be like everyone else: the perfect mediocrity--no better, no worse. Individuality is a monster and it must be strangled in its cradle to make our friends feel comfortable. — Stanley Kubrick
The American people owe it to themselves, and to the cause of free Government, to prove by their establishments for the advancement and diffusion of knowledge, that their political Institutionsare as favorable to the intellectual and moral improvement of Man as they are conformable to his individual and social rights. — James Madison
It is true, we are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the most part, stand off and on upon a harborless coast, are conversant only with the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports of entry, and go into the dry docks of science, where they merely refit for this world, and no natural currents concur to individualize them. — Henry David Thoreau
Unhealthy families discourage individual expression. Everyone must conform to the thoughts and actions of the toxic parents. They promote fusion, a blurring of personal boundaries, a welding together of family members. On an unconscious level, it is hard for family members to know where one ends and another begins. In their efforts to be close, they often suffocate one another's individuality. — Susan Forward
Education, and the life of the mind generally, is a matter in which individual initiative is the chief thing needed; the function of the state should begin and end with insistence on some kind of education, and, if possible, a kind which promotes mental individualism, not a kind which happens to conform to the prejudices of government officials. — Bertrand Russell
We all admire the courageous person and quite often consider the individual who lacks courage, a coward. However, that is not how Earl Nightingale saw it. He said the opposite of courage was not cowardness, it was conformity. The next time you are encouraged to fall into line, to be a sport and everything in you says no - be courageous and go your own way. There is no compensation in conformity. — Bob Proctor
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other. Originality is deliberate and forced, and partakes of the nature of a protest. A society which gives unlimited freedom to the individual, more often than not attains a disconcerting sameness. — Eric Hoffer
Conformities are called for much more eagerly today than yesterday... skeptics, liberals, individuals with a taste for private life and their own inner standards of behavior, are objects of fear and derision and targets of persecution for either side... in the great ideological wars of our time. — Isaiah Berlin
Until you have bred dogs and have drawn and painted them, it is difficult to realize that no two are identical in conformation. You need do no more than gun for a day over two of them to recognize that each is an individual. It requires the intimacy of daily living with a dog to know the subtle quality of his mind, the ham-smell of his ears, and that his wet nose in your mouth tastes salty. — George Bird Evans
The struggle is always between the individual and his sacred right to express himself and the power structure that seeks conformity, suppression, and obedience. — William O. Douglas
It ought to be considered a great misfortune, not only for individuals, but also for Houses and Congregations, to have everything in conformity with their wishes; to go on quietly, and to suffer nothing for the love of God. Yes, consider it certain that a person or a Congregation that does not suffer and is applauded by all the world is near a fall. — St. Vincent
Nature made us individuals, as she did the flowers and the pebbles; but we are afraid to be peculiar, and so our society resembles a bag of marbles, or a string of mold candles. Why should we all dress after the same fashion? The frost never paints my windows twice alike. — Lydia M. Child
Also in contemporary Western society the union with the group is the prevalent way of overcoming separateness. It is a union which the individual self disappears to a large extent, and where the aim is to belong to the heard. If I am like everybody else, if I have no feeling or thoughts which make me different, if I conform in custom, dress, ideas, to the pattern of the group, I am saved: saved from the frightening experience of aloneness. — Erich Fromm
They taught me different was wrong. — Ani Difranco
Our civilization is locked in the grip of an ideology - corporatism. An ideology that denies and undermines the legitimacy of individuals as the citizen in a democracy. The particular imbalance of this ideology leads to a worship of self-interest and a denial of the public good. The practical effects on the individual are passivity and conformism in the areas that matter, and non-conformism in the areas that don't — John Ralston Saul
Because of social pressure, individualism is rejected by most people in favor of conformity. Thus the individual relies mainly upon the actions of others and neglects the meaning of his own personal life. Hence he sees his own life as meaningless and falls into the “existential vacuum” feeling inner void. Progressive automation causes increasing alcoholism, juvenile delinquency, and suicide. — Viktor E. Frankl
In Conclusion
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