Simon Newcomb Quotes

Standardization of our educational systems is apt to stamp out individualism and defeat the very ends of education by leveling the product down rather than up.

One of the shocking things when I go back to Canada is they cut off the tall trees - it's sort of like everyone's the same. Everyone's going to be the same, we're all okay. Just the, sort of, cultural, 'We're all okay.'

The idea of seeing everybody clad the same is not really my cup of tea.

The problem, for me, with the writing programs is that they produce a terrible uniformity of product.

The average bright young man who is drafted hates the whole business because an army always tries to eliminate the individual differences in men.

It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.

When the world becomes standard, I will start caring about standards.

I didn't care too much for ballet, because you had to be more disciplined, and you sort of looked like everyone else. It required a certain kind of conformity that I didn't feel like I wanted to do.

What's sometimes really overwhelming in Sweden is the uniformity. People kind of disappear by all looking the same and wearing the same clothes. There are a lot of great individuals, but it can become a very blank and bleak picture.

I'm afraid that everything will get homogenized and be the same.

I do everything that everybody else does.

It baffles me that everything is so homogenized, because the world isn't, and yet we continue to support things that are so incredibly milquetoast.

The fear that individuality will be crushed out by the growing 'tyranny' of standardization is the sort of myth which cannot withstand the briefest examination.

We're in a very individual sport, but they like us not to be so individual. They'd rather have you look like every other cookie cutter guy and have you believe that you're replaceable when you're really not.

If there is a flaw in the academy system it's that they try to tell them everything. Kids are taught the same. They look the same. So you're constantly looking for the X factor. It's the hardest thing, that mystical ingredient, instinct, the four-second hit, like/dislike, it can come unbelievably quickly.

If we all dress alike, we might as well all work in cubicles.

So many people want to have this typical look and this typical everything and it's all the same everywhere.

Nobody's unique. Everybody copies off of each other. Everybody wears the same type of stuff. Nobody's an individual anymore.

The premise upon which mass compulsion schooling is based is dead wrong. It tries to shoehorn every style, culture, and personality into one ugly boot that fits nobody.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that schools are just factories for turning out robots, that's all. They get you when your small and vulnerable and they take all the human parts away, bit by bit, until you're just a wind-up toy. Turn the key and set it running. And the toy goes to university, gets a job, settles down with someone nice.

There are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying dissipating universe that we can help our children to avoid by providing them with ‘explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly'.

And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.

With the daguerreotype, everyone will be able to have their portrait taken . . . and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same.

Our people made that choice, the choice to go to Sameness. Before my time, before the previous time, back and back and back. We relinquished color when we relinquished sunshine and did away with difference. We gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others.

Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.