Shoshana Zuboff Quotes

We're often too entrenched in existing structures and are so primed to think that if we grew up with the values and the norms, they have to be correct.

Beware, all too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see.

The fact that tradition hinders the individual savage from thinking logically by no means proves that he cannot think logically.

Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think.

To do exactly as your neighbors do is the only sensible rule.

The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers.

We are so conformist; nobody is thinking. We are all sucking up stuff; we have been trained to be consumers, and we are all consuming far too much.

The undignified mania of adaptive conformity, exhibited by many of my kinsmen, has always been very repulsive to me.

Status quo just means that everyone's doing it. It doesn't mean that this was divinely ordained, and of course this is the right decision.

Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to drink other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.

It's very scary to me that people actually think we should just follow our leaders. If we can't learn from our history, we're nowhere.

I get a sense that we've all been educated into one school of thought. I'm not surprised at all to find among the overwhelming majority of scientists, are people who would hold one particular view because that's all they're exposed to.

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.

The race of man, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity.

We too often bind ourselves by authorities rather than by the truth.

I love finding out why people don't love things. And if you ask people why they don't like things, particularly when they get into this sort of culture box, you find out that they're not liking things because of what people are going to think about them, and not because of what the things actually sound like.

I'm afraid Japanese people tend to collective hysteria.

When everyone thinks alike, no one is thinking clearly.

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

The aspects of patriotism that hush dissent, encourage going along, and sanction comfortable distancing and compliance with what is indecent and unacceptable... those aspects are too fundamental to ignore or gloss over.

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.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

I know how easy it is for some minds to glide along with the current of popular opinion, where influence, respectability, and all those motives which tend to seduce the human heart are brought to bear.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

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.