Mary Webb Quotes

I don't want to live up to how people expect me to be.

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.

In our society, no one dares to be themselves.

The trouble with this world is that everybody has to compromise and conform.

It's like, you can't have any fun, and if you do have fun, if you do your own thing, you're considered crazy and should be in a mental institution. Now, that's what I find creepy. I'm eccentric. I am not messed up.

At every point I am besieged by people who would like me to conform to some social norm of whatever sort of social group they expect me to be a part of. I never have any identification with these social groups.

Songs don't have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I've done is about alienation... about where you fit in society.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.

I know that many people kill off their real personality just to fit into this society, but why do we have to compromise? I never understood that. I decided to try to be myself and to live by my own values rather than those of others.

I don't imagine my parents are too excited about my kind of life. The surrounding weirdness bothers them. Still, I think they're pretty good. Their lives are based on what their friends think, just like ours are.

In the U.S., you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.

You know, our sense of individuality is just the number one target of civilization.

Pop music allows you to be who you are without having to wear a social uniform or to conform, which some people find impossible to do.

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

I think in society we tend to put ourselves in boxes and corners and restrict ourselves, and we constantly feel the need to not say this or not wear this.

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

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

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.

There are those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behaviour and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity.

Everyone is being told by society to talk this way, to dress that way, to be this person or to be that person, and it's so important to just maintain a sense of self.

I like the freedom America has. In Japan people tend to think too much about others' opinions and how to be like everybody else but to Americans it seems more important to be who you are and find your own way.

It's nice to stand out and not have to conform to all the beauty standards that just don't even make sense anymore.

I'm not a blender. I don't like people who blend into society.

I wasn't like the rest of the kids. I was an artist. Living in a black society, when you're raised around a bunch of boys who plays sports and chase girls, there's this perception of masculinity that's super hard to fit into. I wasn't the stereotype of that like a lot of my peers were.