George Bernard Shaw Quotes

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.

Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to drink other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

Young people in my generation were sort of in lockstep, and it wasn't just the '40s, either. In the '30s and in the '50s it was the same. No one ever dropped out unless he got sick or got kicked out.

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

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.

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

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.

The hazing experience and then the subsequent participation in the group forces its members to maintain the status quo and traditions at all costs. It demands mindlessness and unquestioned loyalty, resulting in boring people who have little ability to think for themselves or have an opposing viewpoint from those who have the most social power.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

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

There is nothing that makes more cowards and feeble men than public opinion.

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

The enemy of individuality is groupthink.

I just feel like in society and in public, we have this unspoken expectation that we're all trying to meet. And there's so much pressure to try to fit in.

How can we choose to selectively follow what we find comfortable and attack anybody who tries to break free from the norms that we choose to set?

A lady wants to be dressed exactly like everybody else but she gets pretty up- set if she sees anybody else dressed exactly like her.

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

The women all had big minds because they were big animals, but they didn't use them for this reason: unusual ideas could make enemies and the women, if they were going to achieve any sort of comfort and safety, needed all the friends they could get. So, in the interest of survival they trained themselves to be agreeing machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking and then they thought it too.

But when the group is literally capable of changing our perceptions, and when to stand alone is to activate primitive, powerful, and unconscious feelings of rejection, then the health of these institutions seems far more vulnerable than we think.

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

The constant pressure to bring about conformity is a dangerous thing.

The truth is . . . you think what people want you to think.

A lot of what we say and do are regurgitated things that have to do with what we think we're supposed to be saying and doing.

I went to public school for like, one day. I don't get it. Everybody tries to be exactly the same. I think being an outsider is a good thing.