Joe Gold Quotes

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

Most people live their life around what other people do.

I know how easy it is for some minds to glide along with the current of popular opinion, where influence, respectability, and all those motives which tend to seduce the human heart are brought to bear.

Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion.

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.

Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to drink other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.

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

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.

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.

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

Bandwagons roll through our lives. It's up to you whether you jump on them unquestioningly or jump on them to overturn them and subvert them.

To do exactly as your neighbors do is the only sensible rule.

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.

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.

The world chooses to think what the world thinks.

There's kind of this real social pressure to not argue about things.

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

I felt that there were so many people doing it that I would just be like one of the others.

When the people have no other tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one.

To talk of resisting what is called public opinion as a crime, is to make Socrates an anarchist and Jesus Christ a felon.

The masses, the public, is too strict.

When people are free to do as we please, they usually imitate each other.

When in doubt, look at what everyone else is doing.

Understand: as children and young adults, we are taught to conform to certain codes of behavior and ways of doing things. We learn that being different comes with a social price.