Paul Weller Quotes

I think your values are always influenced by your family and your community.

Dress codes and gestures and attitudes have always inspired me, as has youth culture in general, although now I question it more. If you analyze youth cultures over history, there has always been something strict about them - you have to be like this or like that.

You can go into neighborhoods in the United States where people dress a certain way because they don't want to be out of touch, where boys wear pants down to their knees, which nobody has compelled them to do but they pick up the cultural norms, or where girls are improperly dressed by my eyes, but that's what they see in the media.

It is true I am rather taken up with dress; but as to feathers, every one wears them, and it would seem extraordinary if I did not.

The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.

In fashion, there are so many gangs, if you identify too much with one, you get caught - I would lose my freedom.

Human beings are a social species. We like to hang together in groups, just like wildebeests, just like lions. Wildebeests don't hang with lions because lions eat wildebeests. Human beings are like that. We do what that group does that we're trying to identify with.

I think I was a pretty normal student; I just followed most of my friends.

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.

In the first half of the 20th century, fashion was simply not a very English thing to do.

That's why we're doing this, to defend our traditions a little. I don't have anything against it (Halloween), but it's not our tradition.

Culture is just a shambling zombie that repeats what it did in life; bits of it drop off, and it doesn't appear to notice.

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.

You can tell the state of civilization by the way people dress. If the people who fought two World Wars came back to 2010 and saw all of us running around in tracksuits, what would they think? It is just about being sloppy.

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.

It has always been very important to look carefully at young people and the way they wear clothes.

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.

Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

An atmosphere of beliefs and conceptions has been formed by the labours and struggles of our forefathers, which enables us to breathe amid the various and complex circumstances of our life.

The hat is the common headgear of the Turkish people, and the government forbids habits to the contrary.

Men will sooner surrender their rights than their customs.

I'm very fortunate. I loved school and, when I went there, race, gangs and violence were not issues. There was a feeling, gone now, that you had to be presentable. If you hadn't combed your hair, older black ladies - complete strangers - would come up to you in the street and pull out a comb and straighten your tie.

When I was growing up, everyone dressed the same. You had to have bootcut pants and chunky heels.

When I was growing up, we dressed up for church.