quotations about conformity
It would be better for me ... that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself.
PLATO
Gorgias
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Essays and Lectures
To the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free.
OSCAR WILDE
The Soul of Man Under Socialism
Though the customs be both good as customs, and suitable to him, yet to conform to custom, merely as custom, does not educate or develop in him any of the qualities which are the distinctive endowment of a human being.
JOHN STUART MILL
On Liberty
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
The Common Reader
Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
PAUL OF TARSUS
Romans 12:2
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
The Portable Voltaire
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden
I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Essays
The majority principle ... has become the sovereign force to which thought must cater. It is a new god, not in the sense in which the heralds of the great revolutions conceived it, namely, as a power of resistance to existing injustice, but as a power of resistance to anything that does not conform.
MAX HORKHEIMER
Eclipse of Reason
Most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us and we know not where to begin to set them right.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
"Self-Reliance", Essays
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
Imperium Pelagi
The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness.
THEODOR ADORNO
"The Culture Industry Reconsidered"
The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a national philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society.
H.L. MENCKEN
"The National Letters", The Vintage Mencken
I think the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself.
RITA MAE BROWN
Bingo
The common individual always conforms to the prevailing opinion and the prevailing fashion; he regards the state in which everything now exists as the only possible one and passively accepts it all.... To the genius it always occurs to ask: Could this too not be false?
GEORG LICHTENBERG
The Waste Books
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
Hecuba
Rebel, children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory.
RUSSELL BRAND
My Booky Wook
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
Between the Devil and the Dragon
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
MARK TWAIN
Notebook, 1904