It’s true, though, others won’t understand me. I know that. I’m still an alien in the American Christian subculture.Each evening I retreat from it, and I go straight to the Gospels.It’s not out of duty that I read about Jesus; it’s a respite.

National Review’s premise was that conformity was especially egregious among the intellectuals, that herd of independent minds.

Realism arises from the maturity of the minds, while Idealism arises from their conformity.

In every southerner, beneath the veneer of clichés lies a much deeper motherlode of cliché. But even cliché is overlaid with enormous power when a child is involved.

Who was I fooling, telling my heart to quiet its beautiful song so I could march in the parade of conformity? My biggest fool was me.

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 education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What...

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

What I’m starting to realize is that when you conform, people are not accepting you for who you are. They’re accepting you for who they think you are.

Life in society requires consensus as an indispensable condition. But consensus, to be productive, requires that each individual contribute independently out of of his experience and insight.

Die Wissenschaft ist ein Land, welches die Eigenschaft hat, um so mehr Menschen beherbergen zu können, je mehr Bewohner sich darin sammeln; sie ist ein Schatz, der um so grösser wird, je mehr man ihn teilt. Darum kann jeder von uns in seiner Art seine Arbeit tun, und die Gemeinsamkeit bedeutet nicht Gleichförmigkeit.Science is one...

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 better or faster or cheaper than you can.The job might be difficult, it might require skill, but it’s a job.Your...

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 millenia.

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 other in line. And they do it by ridiculing or condemning anyone who commits the crime, and that’s what it’s...

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 best of our ability — and this, this is more than enough.

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 civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance and all the loathsome...

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. They are suspicious, solitary numbers, which is why Mattia thought they were wonderful. Sometimes he thought that they had ended...

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 culture and difference. We fool ourselves and cheat ourselves when we say that all of us are the same. We...

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 was doing on Earth had seemed entirely meaningless. From Liz’s point of view, the question of what her life would...

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 was, had to be unwritten.

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. Conventionality is the death of creation.

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 purpose in the madness. When that day came, I didn’t allow other people to dictate how I should feel or...

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 ‘nine to fiver’, he is part of the labour force, or the bureaucratic force of clerks and managers. He has...