John Steinbeck Quotes

Group action -- yes; group thinking -- no.

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

Some people still believe you should just fall in line with what's going on - and that's scary. It makes a mockery of freedom of speech.

Teach him to think for himself? Oh, my God, teach him rather to think like other people!

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

Minds do not act together in public; they simply stick together; and when their private activities are resumed, they fly apart again.

Basically, I hate conformity. I hate people telling me what to do. It makes me want to smash things. So-called normal behaviour patterns make me so bored, I could throw up!

Society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.

In an over-organized society, the individual is altogether crushed out of existence. He gains the whole wealth of social thought around him and loses his own soul.

I guess, just being in a group, I had never thought to question my individual artistry.

I don't really believe in the idea of the individual.

Perhaps the logical conclusion of everyone looking the same is everyone thinking the same.

Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry.

True, it is evil that a single man should crush the herd, but see not there the worse form of slavery, which is when the herd crushes out the man.

There is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone.

Conformity makes everything easier, if you can still breathe.

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.

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.

Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses.

A lot of people believe that if everybody just did what they were told - obeyed - everything would be fine. But that's not what life is all about. That's not real. It's never going to happen.

The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.

The slaves of socialism are slaves, but they are no one's property and therefore no one's loss.

Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.

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.