James Baldwin Quotes

Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.

How can we choose to selectively follow what we find comfortable and attack anybody who tries to break free from the norms that we choose to set?

There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends.

People like you to be something, preferably what they are.

They don't actually want you to do your own thing, not unless it's their thing too.

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

First of all, whoever didn't want to be a member of this association or the other association, was branded, you know, like a dangerous individualist, you know, infected by the Western decadence, you know. So everybody joined.

Bandwagons roll through our lives. It's up to you whether you jump on them unquestioningly or jump on them to overturn them and subvert them.

The reason most people don't express their individuality and actually deny it, is not fear of what prime ministers think of us or the head of the federal reserve, It's what their families and their friends down at the bar are going to think of them.

People just don't realize how much peer pressure, the desire for peer acclamation, influences them.

Conformism is a potent statement, and as much as we do talk about individuality in fashion, there's a sense that people are fearful of not conforming and not being part of action.

I'd loved to wear jeans and t-shirts, but everybody was in the peace movement back then. And that was my ploy. I had to be careful not to say things like 'I like meat.' Actually I just wanted to drink beer and to screw.

The hazing experience and then the subsequent participation in the group forces its members to maintain the status quo and traditions at all costs. It demands mindlessness and unquestioned loyalty, resulting in boring people who have little ability to think for themselves or have an opposing viewpoint from those who have the most social power.

Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers.

Popular opinion is the biggest 'filter' for most people - they don't have to try something if they've already been told it's not cool.

Understand: as children and young adults, we are taught to conform to certain codes of behavior and ways of doing things. We learn that being different comes with a social price.

I was a bandwagon jumper. If everybody in high school listened to it, so did I.

The psychological peer pressure that the left has employed - and deployed, actually - on young people has been overwhelmingly successful. It has created droves and droves of people that vote against what they know is right, vote against their own self-interest, in exchange for feeling good about themselves and also being immune from criticism.

Crowds can be frightening. They have a way of impressing the low, base taste upon their members. Watching the way thousands of people in his audience could not think for themselves, could not find the courage to allow their ordinary feelings of decency and taste to prevail, I understood better how demagogues are possible.

So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.

Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry.

The reason they want you to fit in... is that once you do, then they can ignore you.

Recall that people like to do what most people think it is right to do; recall too that people like to do what most people actually do.

People said it because other people said it. They did not know why it was being said and heard everywhere. they did not give or ask for reasons.

Most people are sheep, and they need the support of others.