Mark Twain Quotes

A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.

Very often, unfortunately, people may believe something, but they go along with a group of people because they don't have the courage to stand alone or stand up for themselves.

Conformity is the ape of harmony.

Most people suspend their judgment till somebody else has expressed his own and then they repeat it.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

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

We live in a world that tells us not to care, to consume everything in sight. It tells us that being cool and being an individual actually means buying what everyone else is buying and doing what everyone else is doing.

I believe people think as a group more often than we might realize or care to admit. We like to believe that we act as individuals and nothing more, but time and again - in corporations and business, in politics and religion, in fashion and culture, and in friendships and social circles - we think and do as one.

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.

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

Popular opinion is the biggest 'filter' for most people - they don't have to try something if they've already been told it's not cool.

Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts.

Men walk almost always in the paths trodden by others, proceeding in their actions by imitation.

The constant pressure to bring about conformity is a dangerous thing.

I've always thought that anyone who needs to join a herd so badly must be a bit of a sheep himself.

The problem is that we humans are deep conformists.

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.

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

I'm a sheep when it comes to opinions; I will change my mind and jump on the bandwagon.

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 didn't want to wear a checked shirt and grow a mustache - that's what you had to do, and everyone did.

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

There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.

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

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.