Charles Dudley Warner Quotes

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.

Conformity--the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority.

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

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.

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.

When all run by common consent into vice, none appear to do so.

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was 'not done' to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

In Japan, we worry too much about what the other thinks.

The problem is that we humans are deep conformists.

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

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.

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

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

We get on the bandwagon in all sorts of ways - you know minor ways and major ways - like what you've just encountered which isn't censorship exactly, it was something sort of uglier in a way.

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.

A big element of what they regard as conformity is simply a desire to have an audience.

Conformism is a potent statement, and as much as we do talk about individuality in fashion, there's a sense that people are fearful of not conforming and not being part of action.

You might as well play at the show everyone else is playing at.

Everybody wants to be like everybody else.

You see something happen to a population whereby everyone adopts something that's just preposterous in a way that makes it normal instantly. If any one person prior to the rash of puka shells, for example, was seen wearing puka shells, he would look like an idiot. But when everyone is wearing them, it instantly makes them normal.

We all just kinda did everything we thought we were supposed to do and girls dated the guys they were supposed to and did things with the guys they were supposed to.