 
|
The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
-James Baldwin
|
|
|
|
Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture?
-David Bohm
|
|
|
|
Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.
-Jacob Bronowski
|
|
|
|
I think the reward for conformity is everyone likes you but yourself.
-Rita Mae Brown
|
|
|
|
"He who joyfully marches 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 suffice."
-Albert Einstein
|
|
|
|
But you must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know, that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Religion,” English Traits (1856)
|
|
|
|
You don't get harmony when everybody sings the same note.
-Doug Floyd
|
|
|
|
"The fastest way to succeed is to look as if you're playing by somebody else's rules, while quietly playing by your own."
-Michael Konda
|
|
|
|
"A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes."
-Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
|
|
|
|
The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
-Archibald MacLeish
|
|
|
|
"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."
-Christopher Morley
|
|
|
|
"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect."
-Mark Twain
|
|
|
|
In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from.
-Peter Ustinov
|
|
|
|
If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist, it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity.
-Bill Vaughan
|
|
|
|
There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.
-Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
|
|
|
|
We are half ruined by conformity, but we should be wholly ruined without it.
-Charles Dudley Warner
|
|
|
|
Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the dangers of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of 'crackpot' than the stigma of conformity. And on issues that seem important to you, stand up and be counted at any cost.
-Thomas J. Watson
|
|
|
|
If you stand up and be counted, from time to time you may get yourself knocked down. But remember this: A man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good.
-Thomas J. Watson
|
|
Books about Conformity & Nonconformity
