Jacob Bronowski Quotes

How can we choose to selectively follow what we find comfortable and attack anybody who tries to break free from the norms that we choose to set?

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

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

Conformity is dangerous.

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

People may believe that there can be a society where dissent is not permitted, but which is nonetheless not a fear society because everyone agrees with one another and therefore no one wants to dissent.

Some people still believe you should just fall in line with what's going on - and that's scary. It makes a mockery of freedom of speech.

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

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

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.

Unless you hit your television with a sledgehammer, you're not going to be able to be an individual.

Now, in music, it seems more like the popular crowd suppresses anyone who is different.

What concerns me, is the general social tendency to enforce a level, above which nothing rises and stands out.

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

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

Any society where it's a crime or a hassle to be different is a society based on psychological fascism.

You're not allowed to step out of whatever the rules are, politically, or socially, and they'll get you for it, they'll hunt you down. That's the really frightening thing.

So long as a minority conforms to the majority, it is not even a minority.

Society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.

The difference between being out of step with a dictator and being out of step with the democratic majority is practically negligible. The important thing is to be in step.

In an over-organized society, the individual is altogether crushed out of existence. He gains the whole wealth of social thought around him and loses his own soul.

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.

The human race is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it.

It isn't till now, in the American Century, as we have recklessly dubbed it, that tribal pressures toward conformity have been brought to bear so ruthlessly upon men and women seeking to work creatively.

In our society, no one dares to be themselves.