A man’s shortcomings are taken from his epoch; his virtues and greatness belong to himself.

Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: ‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of...

Group conformity scares the pants off me because it’s so often a prelude to cruelty towards anyone who doesn’t want to — or can’t — join the Big Parade.

You can’t be a rebel without the scars that come with it. Truth is, some days scars are just as ugly as they are beautiful.

I’m drawn to unusual, even freakish people. Why? They are far more engaging than the ordinary, which the world has too much of.

I think the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself.

The job is what you do when you are told what to do. The job is showing up at the factory, following instructions, meeting spec, and being managed.Someone can always do your job a little...

Logic is something the mind has created to conceal its timidity, a hocus-pocus designed to give formal validity to conclusions we are willing to accept if everybody else in our set will too.

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...

You laugh at me because I’m different, I laugh at you because you’re all the same.

Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.

When am I going to learn to stop questioning authority and just eat the Soylent Green?

Conformity is often more dangerous than war. War destroys the body but confomity destoys the imaginative mind.

We laugh at sheep because sheep just follow the one in front. We humans have out-sheeped the sheep, because at least the sheep need a sheep dog to keep them in line. Humans keep each...

Curiosity is very important I think, and I think too much of education, starting with childhood education, is either designed to kill curiosity or it works out that way anyway.

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...

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...

Never rebel for the sake of rebelling, but always rebel for the sake of truth.

when you obey the rules, the rules obey you

Prime numbers are divisible only by 1 and by themselves. They hold their place in the infinite series of natural numbers, squashed, like all numbers, between two others, but one step further than the rest....

Our expenses are all for conformity.

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...

We all wear uniforms, even if we’re conforming to unconformity. People who try so hard to look different end up looking the same as all the other people who try so hard to look different.

Let’s make our own way,’ says the Mother, ‘and not in this boat.

I became one of those anonymous Americans who tries to keep his mind sharp and inquisitive while performing all the humiliating rituals of the middle class

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.

On Earth, Liz was constantly occupied with studying and finding a college and a career and all those other things that the adults in her life deemed terribly important. Since she had died, everything she...

I’d trapped myself in a script…. But to be scripted at all is to be prepackaged, programmed, pinned to a page. Only the unwritten can truly live a life. So who I was, what I...

It’s weird not to be weird.

The human spirit lives on creativity and dies in conformity and routine.

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

You say that people are shallow and ignorant until they go out and see the world? Well I, on the other hand, went out and in comparison realized I was in pretty good standing.

Hazel, do you enjoy it?’ I paused a second, trying to figure out if my response should be calibrated to please Augustus or his parents. ‘Most of the people are really nice,’ I finally said.

What editors are obliged to appear to say that men want from women is actually what their advertisers want from women.

Conformity is a cage that confines our ability to think. It is a cage that hinders growth and deters individualism

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....

We are the prisoners of conformity. To get out of this prison, education is the only door and only opportunity.

To conform is to be average.

Rebel children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory.

I existed on my own terms. I was different my entire life. Some called me divergent, wild, crazy, unpredictable and unconformed—an apostate to the rules of the majority. I called myself God’s creation and found...

All the heroes of tomorrow are the heretics of today.

In addition to conformity as a way to relieve the anxiety springing from separateness, another factor of contemporary life must be considered: the role of the work routine and the pleasure routine. Man becomes a...

An artist who conforms to conventional ideas is nothing but a mere charlatan.

The thing I’ve never understood about dancing till now is that it only looks stupid when you’re on the outside, watching other people do it. When you’re part of the crowd, moving along with everyone...

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...

If what you create seems to turn out much stranger than who you are as a person, it’s probably because your heart is talking.

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...

Two reasons why people hate and/or fight change: (1) People fear the unknown; and (2) There are always people profiting from how things are.

Majority decisions tend to be made without engaging the systematic thought and critical thinking skills of the individuals in the group. Given the force of the group’s normative power to shape the opinions of the...

Nowadays, ads don’t just sell a product. They sell an attitude! Look at this one! Here’s a cool guy saying nobody tells him what to do. He does whatever he wants and he buys this...