Erin O'Connor Quotes

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.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

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.

A big element of what they regard as conformity is simply a desire to have an audience.

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.

We all feel the urge to conform; it is the most normal of human desires.

It isn't till now, in the American Century, as we have recklessly dubbed it, that tribal pressures toward conformity have been brought to bear so ruthlessly upon men and women seeking to work creatively.

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?

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

The problem is that we humans are deep conformists.

In fashion, there are so many gangs, if you identify too much with one, you get caught - I would lose my freedom.

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

At every point I am besieged by people who would like me to conform to some social norm of whatever sort of social group they expect me to be a part of. I never have any identification with these social groups.

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

I've always balked at anything that feels like a clique, even if it's not always in my best interest to do so. I like each individual, fedora-wearing hipster - it's just the greater gestalt that rubs me the wrong way.

He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave.

I didn't want to wear a checked shirt and grow a mustache - that's what you had to do, and everyone did.

People more than ever since I can remember are concerned about being out of step and out of line with their political party and won't cross over. There is nobody, man or woman, who wants to be left out, and people are fearful of that. People are fearful of their leadership as well.

There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.

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

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.

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

Most people live their life around what other people do.

We live in a world that tells us not to care, to consume everything in sight. It tells us that being cool and being an individual actually means buying what everyone else is buying and doing what everyone else is doing.

People are so scared to really voice who they are. They want to be politically correct. Just scared to see what other people's perceptions are.