Woodrow Wilson Quotes

The nail that sticks out gets knocked down.

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.

Woe betide the man who refuses to 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?

For years, young adults have adopted extremely liberal world views in their attempts to be different, ultimately failing to see the irony that they've all become the same.

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.

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?

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'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.

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

What concerns me, is the general social tendency to enforce a level, above which nothing rises and stands out.

Everybody wants to be like everybody else.

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

Everything's always about being homogenized and following in a group. The people who stand out always have the most problems.

The nail whose head is sticking up get hammered down.

So long as a minority conforms to the majority, it is not even a minority.

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.

It's a bit weird; everybody is trying to be different, but then they're exactly the same as whatever mob they hang out with.

The fact that we were encouraged to follow our conscience and not to follow the crowds - that's something I really miss. On the other hand, there were things that drove me nuts in the '60s. There was an aspect of the hippie movement that everyone is an artist, which is lethal.

It's perfect to be the same as everyone else.

Conformity is dangerous.

We’re freaks, that’s all. Those two bastards got us nice and early and made us into freaks with freakish standards, that’s all. We’re the tattooed lady, and we’re never going to have a minute’s peace, the rest of our lives, until everybody else is tattooed, too.