Adam Grant Quotes

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

The enemy of individuality is groupthink.

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.

Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?

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

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.

All isolation is wrong so say the herd. And long didst thou belong to the herd.

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.

I hate driving a bandwagon.

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

The only behaviour that is truly common is to avoid doing something because you think others might consider it common.

When the world becomes standard, I will start caring about standards.

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

I think a lot of people have lost respect for the individual, you know, the individual, the person who doesn't conform.

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?

He who fears to be out of the mode does not deserve to belong to himself.

I went to public school for like, one day. I don't get it. Everybody tries to be exactly the same. I think being an outsider is a good thing.

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

I was seen in earlier years by family members and people of authority as somebody wasting his time. I had trouble with the restrictions of conformity. It made me edgy.

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.

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

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

In the U.S., you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.

Everybody wants to be like everybody else.

So I don't think I'm gonna pull my head into my shell just because a bunch of people start acting like idiots.