Conformist Quotes

“Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your roadmap through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.”

— John Taylor Gatto

“You can't be a non-conformist if you don't wear the proper uniform.”

— Jack L. Chalker

“There is none more conformist than one who flaunts his individuality.”

— Rabih Alameddine

“I learned the word non-conformist in fourth grade and immediately announced that I would grow up to become one.”

— Nick Offerman

“Coincidence is just the conformist term for fate.”

— J.A. Redmerski

“( ... the non-conformist, how do you keep from getting scarred?)/i don't! i got a scar here ... and uh i got a scar on my knee ... and uh a few scars on my soul.”

— Marlon Brando

“America ... has created a 'civilization' that represents an exact contradiction of the ancient European tradition. It has introduced the religion of praxis and productivity; it has put the quest for profit, great industrial production, and mechanical, visible, and quantitative achievements over any other interest. It has generated a soulless greatness of a purely technological and collective nature, lacking any background of transcendence, inner light, and true spirituality. America has [built a society where] man becomes a mere instrument of production and material productivity within a conformist social conglomerate”

— Julius Evola

“A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows that from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas of freedom. A free society fertilizes the soil in which non-conformity and dissent and individualism can grow.”

— Henry Steele Commager

“A Conformist is a man who declares, "It's true because others believe it" - but an Individualist is NOT a man who declares, "It's true because I believe it."
An Individual declares, "I believe it because I see in reason that it is true.”

— Ayn Rand

“We'll have for a president a symbolic Rebel against his own power whose election was underwritten by inhuman soulless profit-machines whose takeover of American civic and spiritual life will convince Americans that rebellion against the soulless inhumanity of corporate life will consist in buying products from corporations that do the best job of representing corporate life as empty and soulless. We'll have a tyranny of conformist nonconformity presided over by a symbolic outsider whose very election depended on our deep conviction that his persona is utter bullshit. A rule of image, which because it's so empty makes everyone terrified-they're small and going to die, after all-”

— David Foster Wallace

“I think that certainly the artists of the '40s, '50s and '60s were fighting a very conformist society, which didn't give them enough space to live or create, and they were bucking all kinds of spoken and unspoken rules.”

— Anne Roiphe

“I think religion is a bunch of hooey, and I think that the holidays are an opportunity for people to get stressed out, getting their rush to shop. It's so conformist.”

— Ricky Martin

“The British cinema had been very dull and conformist.”

— Karel Reisz

“Ice dance should not be seen as a rigid conformist form of figure skating. There is a great deal of freedom and originality to be had.”

— Robin Cousins

“The conformist understands that the reason of his desperate look for conformism is that he realises he is different and that he never accepted his difference.”

— Bernardo Bertolucci

“I am a believer and a conformist.”

— Georges Rouault

“A man must consider what rich realms he abdicates when he becomes a conformist”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“No matter how quiet and conformist a person's life seems, there's always a time in the past when they reached an impasse. A time when they went a little crazy. I guess people need that sort of stage in their lives.”

— Haruki Murakami

“Here, by the grace of God and an inside straight, we have a personality untouched by the psychotic taboos of our tribe - and you want to turn him into a carbon copy of every fourth-rate conformist in this frightened land! Why don't you go whole hog? Get him a brief case and make him carry it wherever he goes - make him feel shame if he doesn't have it.”

— Robert A. Heinlein

“The cynic finds love with the idealist. The rebel with the conformist. The social butterfly with the bookworm. They help each other balance their lives.”

— Joyce Brothers

“Don't you get tired of seeing so many "non-conformists" with the same non-conformist look?”

— Thomas Sowell

“School is very conformist, and one of the very first conforming that goes on in preschool and kindergarten is gender.”

— Dan Savage

“According to one influential wing of modern secular society there are few more disreputable fates than to end up being 'like everyone else' for 'everyone else' is a category that comprises the mediocre and the conformist, the boring and the suburban. The goal of all right-thinking people should be to mark themselves off from the crowd and 'stand out' in whatever way their talents allow.”

— Alain De Botton

“There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.”

— Ayn Rand

“No one can possibly achieve any real and lasting success or 'get rich' in business by being a conformist.”

— J. Paul Getty

“The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.”

— Orson Welles

“A lot of singers find a musical genre people like and stick with it. That's being a conformist. I sing ballads, rock, salsa, rap.”

— Thalia

“Not so much because many occupations would not permit of a loving attitude, but because the spirit of a production-centered, commodity-greedy society is such that only the non-conformist can defend himself successfully against it. Those who are seriously concerned with love as the only rational answer to the problem of human existence must, then, arrive at the conclusion that important and radical changes in our social structure are necessary, if love is to become a social and not a highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon.”

— Erich Fromm

“Unshackled by strict yet arbitrary, misguided norms, outcasts can be, look, act, and associate however they want. And in this ever conformist, cookie-cutter, magazine-celebrity-worshipping, creativity-stifling society, the innovation, courage, and differences of the cafeteria fringe are vital to America's culture and progress. Which is why we must celebrate them.”

— Alexandra Robbins

“The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.”

— Max Beerbohm

“The medical profession is - and knows itself to be - endemically conservative and conformist.”

— Margaret Heffernan

“Wild birds will kill exotic ones: the budgies and the lovebirds and the yellow canaries
escaped from their cages and hoping to get a taste of the sky
usually end up back on the ground, plucked raw by their more conformist cousins”

— Joanne Harris

“It's the non-conformist who gives color to history.”

— Dorothy Fuldheim

“Society's only real 'progressives' are the deviants and mutants. Look at evolution - fish who didn't deviate never became amphibians; frogs who didn't mutate never became reptiles; conformist snakes never became mammals , etc. Normal Humans will remain humans, and they'll be subjugated by the digital monsters of the next few millenia.”

— Jim Goad

“Linde's Danger to Self is a warm, candid and appealing account of being an emergency room psychiatrist. Linde captures the non-conformist, hard-boiled style of the psychiatrists who work in this setting.”

— Tanya Luhrmann

“[F]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey.”

— Terry Eagleton

“I think it's too bad when teenagers become conformist in terms of fashion,because it's the ideal time to go off into your own crazy thing without looking completely idiotic.”

— Clemence Poesy

“Schools are generally feminine places, institutions where conformity is valued, taught largely by conformist women.”

— Judith M Bardwick

“The key to all aristeia and wisdom and gnosis is a seed that conformist and mediocritist and democratist Americans haven't got even a scintilla of a prospect of nourishing, and that is sapere aude: DARE TO BE WISE.”

— Kenny Smith

“As human beings we have unlimited potential and imagination. The worst thing you can do is be a conformist and buy into conformity. It's the worst possible thing. It's better to be outrageous. It's better to hang out with the sages, the people open to possibilities, even the psychotics. You never know where you'll find the geniuses of our society.”

— Deepak Chopra

“It's easier to be conformist naturally; it's easier except for those who don't like conformism.”

— Elie Wiesel

“The intellectual world is deeply conformist ... We talk a lot about the crimes of others. When it comes to our own crimes, we are nationalists in the Orwellian sense.”

— Noam Chomsky

“But the frat boys were all frivolous and idiotic in our minds now, a bunch of conformist fools going through the motions of hip.”

— Bill Ayers

“The more defensive a society, the more conformist.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“My prodigious sin was, and still is, being a non-conformist.”

— Charlie Chaplin

“Friends have asked how I came to engender this American antagonism. My prodigious sin was, and still is, being a non-conformist. Although I am not a Communist I refused to fall in line by hating them. Secondly, I was opposed to the Committee on Un-American Activities - a dishonest phrase to begin with, elastic enough to wrap around the throat and strangle the voice of any American citizen whose honest opinion is a minority of one.”

— Charlie Chaplin

“True individualists tend to be quite unobservant; it is the snob, the would be sophisticate, the frightened conformist, who keeps a fascinated or worried eye on what is in the wind.”

— Louis Kronenberger

“The first step in freeing yourself from social restrictions is the realization that there is no such thing as a safe code of conduct - one that would earn everyone's approval. Your actions can always be condemned by someone - for being too bold or too apathetic, for being too conformist or too nonconformist, for being too liberal or too conservative. So it's necessary to decide whose approval is important to you.”

— Harry Browne

“Government provided free tuition tends more and more to produce a uniform conformist education, with college faculties ultimately dependent for their jobs on the government, and so developing an economic interest in profession and teaching a statist, pro-government, and socialist ideology.”

— Henry Hazlitt

“I'm naturally quite conformist, really. If I go to a country and they say, "You've got to drive on the right," I'm not going to drive on the left to show that I'm different. I'm able to stick to the law.”

— Robert Wyatt