Stew Quotes

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.

Most people live their life around what other people do.

The world chooses to think what the world thinks.

Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry.

There are times when the voice of repining is completely drowned out by various louder voices: the voice of government, the voice of taste, the voice of celebrity, the voice of the real world, the voice of fear and force, the voice of gossip.

Activities that seem to represent choices are often inert reproductions of accepted practice.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

We're led to believe everybody opposes it and disagrees with political correctness, but yet everybody's scared to death of it. So who is it? Well, it's the power structure wherever you happen to be.

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.

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

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.

Everybody thinks that I did this and I did that, but I just went along with the times.

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.

Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion.

To talk of resisting what is called public opinion as a crime, is to make Socrates an anarchist and Jesus Christ a felon.

The masses, the public, is too strict.

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.

In the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day ... a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevents independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life.

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.

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.

We're constantly being fed images and being told what to like and what is good, and for the most part, I think people enjoy living that way. It takes a lot of the thinking out of it.

We, as a society, have become very fixed in our ideas of how things were, how they are, and how they should be.

I'll put it to you like this: You can only go as mainstream as people will let you go.

There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends.

Conformity is the ape of harmony.