Richard O'Brien Quotes

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

In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.

I was a victim of the American Dream, the bourgeois, middle-class dream. All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.

I think that, in terms of mainstream storytelling, the rebel gets off way too easy. We're way too hard on the insiders and way too soft on the outsiders.

The reason they want you to fit in... is that once you do, then they can ignore you.

They don't actually want you to do your own thing, not unless it's their thing too.

We live in a funny time. If you don't go corporate, you can't compete. You're relegated as irrelevant. People used to admire that.

The whole system of society tells you what to do.

We all just kinda did everything we thought we were supposed to do and girls dated the guys they were supposed to and did things with the guys they were supposed to.

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.

We have been obliged to respond to the compulsions of our society.

The masses, the public, is too strict.

Nobody has ever expected me to be President. In my poor, lean lank face nobody has ever seen that any cabbages were sprouting.

Action requires co-operation, but in general if you set your face against custom, people will set their faces against you. They cannot tell whether you are right or wrong, but they know that you are guilty of a pragmatical assumption of superiority over them which they do not like.

The young always have the same problem – how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.

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.

Consciously or unconsciously most of us adhere to what is expected of our role because we realize our social success depends on this. Some may refuse to play this game, but in the end they are marginalized and forced to play the outsider role, with limited options and decreasing freedom as they get older.

Peer pressure is a huge part of youth behavior, whether one grows up in Washington, D.C., or Cody, Wyo.

Respectability? Who wants to be respectable? That's spoken like a true loser.

My mother's mantra was, 'How would it look to the neighbors?' And so you don't do anything because you're worried about how it would look to the neighbors.

I had friends who were jocks or whatever... Then, around 12 or 13, kids get cliquish and cruel, and that disgusted me. It seemed a reprehensible use of one's arbitrary social status. So I got really aggressive about it and became more of a weird kid.

I so desperately wanted to fit in. There was a trajectory, and obviously, our society tells us that you go to high school, you graduate, and then you go to college, and from there, you get an internship, you get a job, and some people study abroad, and there are so many things you see that you desperately want to be a part of.

It's true that every leader needs followers. We can't all be nonconformists at every moment, but conformity is dangerous - especially for an entity in formation.

Online, you're trying to appeal to everyone and people who you don't know at the same time. So I think, as a side effect, it amplifies the desire for groupthink.

What we didn't realize then - and one of the many things Timothy Leary was wrong about - is that when you drop out, you inevitably also drop in.