Henrik Ibsen Quotes

The whole system of society tells you what to do.

Just because so many conforming kids wake up every morning asking, 'What is everybody else going to wear today?' doesn't mean that they don't wish it were different. Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

At this level, the individual perceives the maintenance of the expectations of his family, group, or nation as valuable in its own right, regardless of immediate and obvious consequences.

Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal - a sort of 'voting' situation. But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.

Civilization is a conspiracy. Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences.

Sometimes, if you wear suits for too long, it changes your ideology.

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.

I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps.

Societies depend on agreed rules.

I'm not being secretive about anything. I just actually don't have opinions about society.

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

Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

The government has once again made the right socially acceptable.

In civilized life, where the happiness and indeed almost the existence of man, depends on the opinion of his fellow men. He is constantly acting a studied part.

We have been obliged to respond to the compulsions of our society.

Consciously or unconsciously most of us adhere to what is expected of our role because we realize our social success depends on this. Some may refuse to play this game, but in the end they are marginalized and forced to play the outsider role, with limited options and decreasing freedom as they get older.

I don't care much about society.

The first effect of adjusting to other people is that one becomes boring.

In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense.

If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.

Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.

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.

All of us have to be prevaricators, hypocrites, and liars every day of our lives; otherwise the social structure would fall into pieces the first day. We must act in one another's presence just as we must wear clothes. It is for the best

We ought always to conform to the manners of the greater number, and so behave as not to draw attention to ourselves. Excess either way shocks, and every man truly wise ought to attend to this in his dress as well as language, never to be affected in anything and follow without being in too great haste the changes of fashion.

Conformity is the ape of harmony.