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 only real fashion crime — Simon Doonan
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth. — John F. Kennedy
Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals. — Aldo Leopold
He who would be a man must therefore be a non-conformist. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Go against the grain, refuse to conform, take the road less traveled instead of the well-beaten path. — Mandy Hale
A free society cherishes nonconformity.
It knows from the non-conformist, from the eccentric,
have come many of the great ideas. — Henry Steele Commager
Be neither a conformist or a rebel, for they are really the same thing. Find your own path, and stay on it. — Paul Vixie
Obey the principles without being bound by them. — Bruce Lee
The problem with always being a conformist is that when you try to change the system from within, it's not you who changes the system; it's the system that will eventually change you. — Immortal Technique
A contrarian isn’t one who always objects — that’s a conformist of a different sort. A contrarian reasons independently, from the ground up, and resists pressure to conform. — Naval Ravikant
My darling girl, when are you going to understand that "normal" isn't a virtue? It rather denotes a lack of courage. — Stockard Channing
The opposite of courage in our society isn't cowardice, its conformity.
Since I'm a contrarian, I don't want to go along with what everyone else thinks. — Akira Toriyama
In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. — John Stuart Mill
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
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. — Frederick Salomon Perls
Non Conformist Quotes
We live in a society that penalizes highly creative individuals for their non-conformist autonomy. This makes the teaching of problem solving in design both discouraging and difficult. A...student (has) massive blocks against new ways of thinking, engendered by some 16 years of mis-education. — Victor Papanek
All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions. All change is the result of a change in the contemporary state of mind. — Adlai E. Stevenson
Rebels and non-conformists are often the pioneers and designers of change. — Indira Gandhi
Let's teach them how to dream big, let us teach them never to conform.
The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all. — Max Beerbohm
Why is it that all non-conformists look the same? — Billy Corgan
Don't you get tired of seeing so many "non-conformists" with the same non-conformist look? — Thomas Sowell
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.
You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. — Eric Hoffer
The only true non-conformists are in the asylums; the only radically free spirits are in the death house awaiting the chair. We live by patterns. — Herman Wouk
(...the non-conformist, how do you keep from getting scarred?)/i don’t! i got a scar here…and uh i got a scar on my knee…and uh a few scars on my soul. — Marlon Brando
If children were brought up to become non-conformists it would only ruin their lives. So parents all over China who loved their children told them to do as Chairman Mao said. It was not possible to tell them anything else. — Jung Chang
One must do no violence to nature, nor model it in conformity to any blindly formed chimera. — Janos Bolyai
The world said to conform, the world said to settle for less, the world said to compromise and no one would know... so I made my own world. — Bijan
Conformity may give you a quiet life; it may even bring you to a University Chair. But all change in history, all advance, comes from the nonconformists. If there had been no trouble-makers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves. — A. J. P. Taylor
I regret that I didn’t realize that actually they’ve got no power over you at school — it’s all just a trick to indoctrinate you into being a conditioned, tame, placid citizen. Rebel, children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory. — Russell Brand
I was very far away. My real life had gone underground and could not be seen by anybody. The person at the surface that everybody saw was no longer me. — Philip O Ceallaigh
What is a rebel? A man who says no. — Albert Camus
No man on earth is truly free, All are slaves of money or necessity. Public opinion or fear of prosecution forces each one, against his conscience, to conform. — Euripides
Conformity can be costly in a world of uncertainty which requires innovative institutional creation because no one can know the right path to survival. Over time, the richer the cultural context in terms of providing multiple experimentation and creative competition, the more likely the successful survival of the society — Douglass North
I'm not saying that atheists can't act morally or have moral knowledge. But when I ascribe virtue to an atheist, it's as a theist who sees the atheist as conforming to objective moral values. The atheist, by contrast, has no such basis for morality. And yet all moral judgments require a basis for morality, some standard of right and wrong. — William A. Dembski
Love allows your beloved the freedom to be unlike you. Attachment asks for conformity to your needs and desires. Love imposes no demands. Attachment expresses an overwhelming demand - "Make me feel whole." Love expands beyond the limits of two people. Attachment tries to exclude everything but two people. — Deepak Chopra
Until we lose ourselves there is no hope of finding ourselves. — Henry Miller
When women are relegated to moods, mannerisms, and contours that conform to a single ideal of beauty and behavior, they are captured in both body and soul, and are no longer free. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. — Christopher Morley
Human beings today are surrounded by huge institutions we can never penetrate: the City, the banking system, political and advertising conglomerates, vast entertainment enterprises. They've made themselves user friendly, but they define the tastes to which we conform. They're rather subtle, subservient tyrants, but no less sinister for that. — J. G. Ballard
As to harmonizing the theory of evolution with the Biblical account of creation, I do not believe it can be done, and I do not see why it should be. The story of Genesis is beautiful, and profoundly significant as symbolism: there is no good reason to torture it into conformity with modern theory. — Will Durant
Fashion is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism ... tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute. — William Hazlitt
No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse. — Friedrich Nietzsche
I find no quality so easy for a man to counterfeit as devotion, though his life and manner are not conformable to it; the essence of it is abstruse and occult, but the appearances easy and showy. — Michel de Montaigne
There is such a thing as caste, even in the West; but it is comparatively faint; it is conservatism here. It says, forsake not your calling, outrage no institution, use no violence, rend no bonds; the State is thy parent. Its virtue or manhood is wholly filial. — Henry David Thoreau
Jazz is not a game of chance. Its sonorous disorder is only an appearance. It is an organized force obeying obscure laws, conforming to a secret technique, codified or not, and we discover that no one can become a virtuoso on the spur of the moment in this orchestra of 'noisemakers. — Wanda Landowska
While to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all. — Oscar Wilde
True conformity to the dictates of nature requires reverence for the past and solicitude for the future. 'Nature' is not simply the sensation of the passing moment; it is eternal, though we evanescent men experience only a fragment of it. We have no right to imperil the happiness of posterity by impudently tinkering with the heritage of humanity. — Russell Kirk
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. — Sydney J. Harris
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
No attempt to explain the world, either scientifically or theologically, can be considered successful until it accounts for the paradoxical conjunction of the temporal and the atemporal, of being and becoming. And no subject conforms this paradoical conjuction more starkly than the origin of the universe. — Paul Davies
It is useless for large companies of believers to spend long hours begging God to send revival. Unless we intend to reform we may as well not pray. Unless praying men have the insight and faith to amend their whole way of life to conform to the New Testament pattern there can be no true revival. — Aiden Wilson Tozer
There is no right way to live. You preclude a lot of life by trying to conform to that kind of ideal or stereotype. And it's a natural inclination in a world where it's so complex and so occasionally valueless, morally bankrupt, and chaotic that we want to reach back to something in our past. — Gary Ross
When my dreams showed signs
of becoming
politically correct
no unruly images
escaping beyond borders
...
then I began to wonder — Adrienne Rich
I call that law universal, which is conformable merely to dictates of nature; for there does exist naturally an universal sense of right and wrong, which, in a certain degree, all intuitively divine, even should no intercourse with each other, nor any compact have existed. — Aristotle
Late, by myself, in the boat of myself, no light and no land anywhere, cloudcover thick. I try to stay just above the surface, yet I'm already under and living within the ocean. — Rumi
No emotion is, in itself, a judgement; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. but they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it. — C. S. Lewis
If critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered "dangerous" but set in place in their compartmental understandings. — Jack Kerouac
They offer me neither food nor drink - intellectual nor spiritual consolation... [Conservatism] leads nowhere; it satisfies no ideal; it conforms to no intellectual standard, it is not safe, or calculated to preserve from the spoilers that degree of civilization which we have already attained. — John Maynard Keynes
What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face. The way men usually are, it takes a name to make something visible for them. — Friedrich Nietzsche
I did not obey your instructions. No. I conformed to the instructions of truth and Nature, and maintained your interest, against your opinions, with a constancy that became me. A representative worthy of you ought to be a person of stability. I am to look, indeed, to your opinions,but to such opinions as you and I must have five years hence. I was not to look to the flash of the day. I knew that you chose me, in my place, along with others, to be a pillar of the state, and not a weathercock on the top of the edifice, exalted for my levity and versatility, and of no use but to indicate the shiftings of every fashionable gale. — Edmund Burke
Fashion is a tyrant from which there is no deliverance; all must conform to its whimsical. — Proverbs
Fashon is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism: it is haughty, trifling, affected, servile, despotic, mean and ambitious, precise and fantastical, all in a breath -- tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute. — William Hazlitt
Our faith acknowledges that no two people think, believe, taste, feel, hear, or encounter life in the same way. Those who are disciplined, for whatever reason, to conform to a single commonly held creed seek their own truthful and compassionate ways to live. We give our approval and seek acceptance because it is validating. It frees us to become our best selves. It is our very differences that make it necessary to practice acceptance toward one another. — Carolyn OwenTowle
Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear. There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. — Claude Debussy
Real education must be about discovering the unknown, and whenever education becomes a system of conformity it is no longer useful. — Bryant H. McGill
Skepticism requires disbelief and curiosity, not conformity to conventional wisdom. There's no science here. This is pure politics. — Rush Limbaugh
As for my slowness as a writer - that's been a struggle, no question. We live in a culture that values and rewards machine-speed productivity. Even the arts are expected to conform to the Taylor model of productivity. — Junot Diaz
I try to please people, to give them a good time, but I refuse to make my act conform to traditional show-biz standards of entertainment. There's a little voice that says, 'Oh, no, you can't do that, that's breaking all the rules.' That's the voice of show business. Then this other little voice says, 'Try it.' And most of the time, when the voice comes on and says, 'No,' that's the time it works. — Andy Kaufman
The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men. — Henry David Thoreau
In Conclusion
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