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...

I would rather be an artist than a leader. Ironically, a leader has to follow the rules.

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

Wisdom to accept change creates life, but conformity creates stagnation and leads to death.

If a man does not keep pace with his companion, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

In general, opinions contrary to those commonly received can only obtain a hearing by studied moderation of language, and the most cautious avoidance of unnecessary offence, from which they hardly ever deviate even in a...

It takes money to make money, even begging. Humans are herd animals. If a stranger’s bleeding to death beside the road, most people won’t stop to offer a Band-Aid. But get the ball rolling with...

If New Orleans is not fully in the mainstream of culture, neither is it fully in the mainstream of time. Lacking a well-defined present, it lives somewhere between its past and its future, as if...

We all know that any emotional bias — irrespective of truth or falsity — can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely...

I like weird. Conformity bores but is inescapable for the most part. We all follow something, even if it is following the goal of wanting to stand apart. We are a sea of ordinary people;...

We are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them, both immature responses.

At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet.

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...

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.

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...

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.