Louis Kronenberger Quotes

Most people live their life around what other people do.

Most of us are 'ultraconformists' when it comes to who we are most likely to follow... to socialise with, or even who we are most likely to hire.

Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed.

Society is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has.

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.

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

The whole system of society tells you what to do.

Men are herd animals, and prefer to go with the flow, especially when moving in the other direction is harsh.

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

When we find ourselves in groups or with charismatic individuals, we might do things we wouldn't ordinarily do.

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?

We laugh at sheep because sheep just follow the one in front. We humans have out-sheeped the sheep, because at least the sheep need a sheep dog to keep them in line. Humans keep each other in line. And they do it by ridiculing or condemning anyone who commits the crime, and that’s what it’s become, of being different.

Society will be obeyed; if you refuse obedience, you must take the consequences. Society has only one law, and that is custom. Even religion itself is socially powerful only just so far as it has custom on its side.

Or about how when you're a child, to stop you from following the crowd you're assaulted with the line "If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?" but when you're an adult and to be different is suddenly a crime, people seem to be saying, "Hey. Everyone else is jumping off a bridge. Why aren't you?

Failing conventionally is the route to go; as a group, lemmings may have a rotten image, but no individual lemming has ever received bad press

We arrange our lives-even the best and boldest men and women that exist, just as much as the most limited-with reference to what society conventionally rules and makes right.

Often we don't notice the stringent rules to which our culture subjects us.

Young people in my generation were sort of in lockstep, and it wasn't just the '40s, either. In the '30s and in the '50s it was the same. No one ever dropped out unless he got sick or got kicked out.

When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.

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

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.

People are going to behave however the social norms permit, and beyond that.

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

We are half ruined by conformity, but we should be wholly ruined without it.