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Conformity Quotes
	Walter Bagehot	Persecution in intellectual countries produces a superficial conformity, but also underneath an intense, incessant, implacable doubt.
	Frederic Bastiat	Actually, it is not strange that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the human race was regarded as inert matter, ready to receive everything -- form, face, energy, movement, life -- from a great prince or a great legislator or a great genius. These centuries were nourished on the study of antiquity. And antiquity presents everywhere -- in Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome -- the spectacle of a few men molding mankind according to their whims, thanks to the prestige of force and of fraud. But this does not prove that this situation is desirable. It proves only that since men and society are capable of improvement, it is naturally to be expected that error, ignorance, despotism, slavery, and superstition should be greatest towards the origins of history. The writers quoted above were not in error when they found ancient institutions to be such, but they were in error when they offered them for the admiration and imitation of future generations. Uncritical and childish conformists, they took for granted the grandeur, dignity, morality, and happiness of the artificial societies of the ancient world. They did not understand that knowledge appears and grows with the passage of time; and that in proportion to this growth of knowledge, might takes the side of right, and society regains possession of itself.
	Howard Beale	So, you listen to me. Listen to me! Television is not the truth. Television's a god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business... We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness. You maniacs. In God's name, you people are the real thing. We are the illusion.
	Mark Berley	Political correctness is really a subjective list put together by the few to rule the many -- a list of things one must think, say, or do. It affronts the right of the individual to establish his or her own beliefs.
	Isaiah Berlin	Conformities are called for much more eagerly today than yesterday... skeptics, liberals, individuals with a taste for private life and their own inner standards of behavior, are objects of fear and derision and targets of persecution for either side... in the great ideological wars of our time.
	Justice Hugo L. Black	The public welfare demands that constitutional cases must be decided according to the terms of the Constitution itself, and not according to judges’ views of fairness, reasonableness, or justice.
	Alan Bloom	Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity, but the one that removes awareness of other possibilities.
	William F. Buckley, Jr.	We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how very often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down.
	Edmund Burke	The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded.
	Samuel Butler	He that complies against his will, Is of his own opinion still.
	Samuel Butler	The more unpopular an opinion is, the more necessary it is that the holder should be somewhat punctilious in his observance of conventionalities generally.
	Carrie Chapman Catt	There are two kinds of restrictions on human liberty -- the restraint of law and that of custom. No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
	Henry Steele Commager	A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas.
	Communist Party Education Workers Congress	We must create out of the younger generation a generation of Communists. We must turn children, who can be shaped like wax, into real, good Communists.... We must remove the children from the crude influence of their families. We must take them over and, to speak frankly, nationalize them. From the first days of their lives they will be under the healthy influence of Communist children's nurseries and schools. There they will grow up to be real Communists.
	Steven Crowder	This is why political correctness, or Cultural Marxism,… lends itself so fashionably to easy labels. Transphobic, homophobic, xenophobic, racist, bigoted, Uncle Tom, white privilege, mainsplaining. All of these are slapped on people with "politically incorrect" opinions in an attempt to silence you... Hate speech is inextricably tied to political correctness, or Cultural Marxism, and that creates intellectual conformity -- or intellectual authoritarianism. And that’s where you start to see things like “safe spaces” or “trigger warnings” or speakers banned from campus, or people with unpopular opinions banned from social media.
	Steven Crowder	This is why political correctness, or Cultural Marxism,… lends itself so fashionably to easy labels. Transphobic, homophobic, xenophobic, racist, bigoted, Uncle Tom, white privilege, mainsplaining. All of these are slapped on people with "politically incorrect" opinions in an attempt to silence you...
	e. e. cummings	To be nobody but yourself -- in a world which is doing it's best, night and day, to make you like everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.
	Michel De Montaigne	Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.
	Alexis de Tocqueville	After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
	William O. Douglas	I think that the influence towards suppression of minority views – towards orthodoxy in thinking about public issues – has been more subconscious than unconscious, stemming to a very great extent from the tendency of Americans to conform…not to deviate or depart from an orthodox point of view.
	David Edwards	The modern susceptibility to conformity and obedience to authority indicates that the truth endorsed by authority is likely to be accepted as such by a majority of the people.
	Albert Einstein	It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.
	Albert Einstein	He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice.
	Cat Farmer	If you suppose that good intentions justify intruding on the lives and properties of your fellow citizens: Do you appreciate being the target of somebody else's good intentions, or haven't you had that particular dubious pleasure yet?
	John Kenneth Galbraith	These are the days when men of all social disciplines and all political faiths seek the comfortable and the accepted; when the man of controversy is looked upon as a disturbing influence; when originality is taken to be a mark of instability; and when, in minor modification of the original parable, the bland lead the bland.
	Josiah William Gitt	Humanity's most valuable assets have been the non-conformists. Were it not for the non-conformists, he who refuses to be satisfied to go along with the continuance of things as they are, and insists upon attempting to find new ways of bettering things, the world would have known little progress, indeed.
	William Godwin	Government will not fail to employ education to strengthen its hands and perpetuate its institutions.
	Judge Learned Hand	All discussion, all debate, all dissidence tends to question and in consequence, to upset existing convictions; that is precisely its purpose and its justification.
	Adolf Hitler	The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life.
	Eric Hoffer	Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority.
	John Holt	No use to shout at them to pay attention. If the situations, the materials, the problems before the child do not interest him, his attention will slip off to what does interest him, and no amount of exhortation of threats will bring it back.
	Justice Charles Evans Hughes	Our institutions were not devised to bring about uniformity of opinion; if they had we might well abandon hope. It is important to remember, as has well been said, 'the essential characteristic of true liberty is that under its shelter many different types of life and character and opinion and belief can develop unmolested and unobstructed.'
	Dr. Samuel Johnson	The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.
	Carl Gustav Jung	A shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.
	Garrison Keillor	My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time.
	Garrison Keillor	You taught me to be nice, so nice that now I am so full of niceness, I have no sense of right and wrong, no outrage, no passion.
	George F. Kennan	The truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas -- complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemmas, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse.
	John F. Kennedy	Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.
	Krishnamurti	It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
	Louis Kronenberger	True individualists tend to be quite unobservant; it is the snob, the... sophisticate, the frightened conformist, who keeps a fascinated or worried eye on what is in the wind.
	Gotthold Ephraim Lessing	Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.
	John Locke	New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.
	John Locke	Any single man must judge for himself whether circumstances warrant obedience or resistance to the commands of the civil magistrate; we are all qualified, entitled, and morally obliged to evaluate the conduct of our rulers. This political judgment, moreover, is not simply or primarily a right, but like self-preservation, a duty to God. As such it is a judgment that men cannot part with according to the God of Nature. It is the first and foremost of our inalienable rights without which we can preserve no other.
	Hiram Mann	No man escapes\\ When freedom fails,\\ The best men rot in filthy jails;\\ And they who cried: “Appease, Appease!”\\ Are hanged by men they tried to please.
	Mignon McLaughlin	Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.
	Herman Melville	It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
	H. L. Mencken	And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.
	H. L. Mencken	Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.
	H. L. Mencken	The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues, and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else...Their purpose, in brief, is to make docile and patriotic citizens, to pile up majorities, and to make John Doe and Richard Doe as nearly alike, in their everyday reactions and ways of thinking, as possible.
	H. L. Mencken	The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.
	H. L. Mencken	The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form 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 natural 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 only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have.
	John Stuart Mill	A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.
	Octave Mirbeau	You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.
	John Viscount Morley	When it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.
	Edward R. Murrow	If none of us ever read a book that was “dangerous,” had a friend who was “different,” or joined an organization that advocated “change,” we would all be the kind of people Joe McCarthy wants.
	Kathleen Norris	In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary.
	Eleanor Holmes Norton	The essence of a free life is being able to choose the style of living you prefer free from exclusion and without the compulsion of conformity or law.
	P. J. O'Rourke	There’s a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any over-large concentration of like-minded individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.
	William Paley	Natural liberty is the right of common upon a waste; civil liberty is the safe, exclusive, unmolested enjoyment of a cultivated enclosure.
	Kort E. Patterson	According to Gestapo records…they had little need to engage in direct spying on the citizens since the citizens themselves were more than willing to do their spying for them.
	Dr. Chester Pierce	Every child in America who enters school at the age of five is mentally ill, because he comes to school with an allegiance toward our elected officials, toward our founding fathers, toward our institutions, toward the preservation of this form of government that we have. Patriotism, nationalism, and sovereignty, all that proves that children are sick because a truly well individual is one who has rejected all of those things, and is truly the international child of the future.
	Snell Putney	There is no inherent misdirection in holding unorthodox views. Indeed, the autonomous individual, free from compulsive conformance and unquestioned assumptions, is likely to be unorthodox... They stimulate the climate of controversy without which political democracy becomes an empty formalism.
	Ronald Reagan	There are many well-meaning people today who work at placing an economic floor beneath all of us so that no one shall exist below a certain level or standard of living, and certainly we don't quarrel with this. But look more closely and you may find that all too often these well-meaning people are building a ceiling above which no one shall be permitted to climb and between the two are pressing us all into conformity, into a mold of standardized mediocrity.
	David Reisman	The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.
	Benjamin A. Rooge	Give me control over a man's economic actions, and hence over his means of survival, and except for a few occasional heroes, I'll promise to deliver to you men who think and write and behave as I want them to.
	Jean-Jacques Rousseau	The most absolute authority is that which penetrates into a man’s innermost being and concerns itself no less with his will than with his actions.
	Jean-Jacques Rousseau	There is no subjugation so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom for in that way one captures volition itself.
	Bertrand Russell	What's the difference between a bright, inquisitive five-year-old, and a dull, stupid nineteen-year-old? Fourteen years of the British educational system.
	Butler D. Shaffer	The State…has had a vested interest in promoting attitudes that would tend to make us skeptical of our own abilities, fearful of the motives of others, and emotionally dependent upon external authorities for purpose and direction in our lives.
	Ben Shahn	Every great historic change has been based on nonconformity, has been bought either with the blood or with the reputation of nonconformists.
	Percy Bysshe Shelley	[A]nd obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men and of the human frame, A mechanized automaton.
	Percy Bysshe Shelley	Power, like a desolating pestilence,\\ Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,\\ Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,\\ Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame,\\ A mechanized automaton.
	Joseph Sobran	The difference between a politician and a pickpocket is that the pickpocket doesn't get indignant when you tell him to keep his hands to himself.