Nathaniel Branden Quotes

People like you to be something, preferably what they are.

Just because so many conforming kids wake up every morning asking, 'What is everybody else going to wear today?' doesn't mean that they don't wish it were different. Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

I just want to be like other people that are normal.

Like so many kids, I just wanted to fit in, and I see now that I spent most of my life trying to be what I wasn't, trying to get people to like me.

I'd rather look ridiculous when everybody else does than plain and sensible all by myself.

A woman who does not know herself has no choice other than to live with other people’s evaluations. But no one can adapt perfectly to public opinion. And herein lies the source of their destruction.

I think a lot of young kids at school are very conscious of trying to keep credibility in case they kind of stand out in a crowd and get bullied by trying to stay cool and stuff. And my whole thing, all the way through school, was I was just a goof... I didn't care.

The race of man, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity.

There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.

The only behaviour that is truly common is to avoid doing something because you think others might consider it common.

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.

A big element of what they regard as conformity is simply a desire to have an audience.

Well, sometimes when you say you want to be like everybody else, you're really saying that you're not.

Most people live their life around what other people do.

The essential problems remain the same... The kids I write about are asking for the same things I wanted. They want two contradictory things. They want to be the same as everyone else, and they want to be different from everyone else. They want acceptance for both.

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.

I was always a class clown, so I never had trouble fitting in; I just had trouble finding out where I really wanted to be.

Fitting in is boring. But it takes you nearly your whole life to work that out.

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.

People want to be liked by other people, so they adopt other people's standards, but for me, my standard had always been true.

All I've ever wanted is to be normal.

I felt that there were so many people doing it that I would just be like one of the others.

The undignified mania of adaptive conformity, exhibited by many of my kinsmen, has always been very repulsive to me.

When people are free to do as we please, they usually imitate each other.