James S. Coleman Quotes

While children are struggling to be unique, the world around them is trying all means to make them look like everybody else.

I really wanted to go to high school and be normal.

Understand: as children and young adults, we are taught to conform to certain codes of behavior and ways of doing things. We learn that being different comes with a social price.

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

Some kids look at me strange in the hallways because I don't decorate my locker.

When my friends started to care about getting girlfriends, I really didn't. I started to think, literally, 'What's wrong with me?' and, 'Why can't I be normal like everybody else?'

Acceptance and assimilation, you know, breeds mediocrity and perhaps an even more sheep-like conformism in terms of what kind of music you're supposed to listen to if you're gay... What are you supposed to look like? What's your body supposed to look like?

In Japan, we worry too much about what the other thinks.

When we find ourselves in groups or with charismatic individuals, we might do things we wouldn't ordinarily do.

The voice of authority speaks not for the one but for the many; authority figures have a strong and rapid effect on social norms in part because they change our assumptions about what other people think.

I would say I was an all-American teenager.

I wasn't like the rest of the kids. I was an artist. Living in a black society, when you're raised around a bunch of boys who plays sports and chase girls, there's this perception of masculinity that's super hard to fit into. I wasn't the stereotype of that like a lot of my peers were.

Who says what is the right way and what isn't? That is some imagined social construct that people made up to feel okay about being average.

When you're in a friend circle, you all kind of talk the same way. And it's hard to do on-the-fly radio edits of yourself.

If you want to fit in, you try to mirror whatever anyone wants from you.

In society, you are taught to belong. You have to belong to something.

We grow up, and we need to confront a society to be fit in.

Some of us have been told what we want our whole lives. We've been told we should want to go out for sports or not. We should want a college education or a graduate degree or a particular career. We should want to date this person and not the other.

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?

In high school, it was very fashionable to be disdainful of the bourgeois suburbs, but I secretly liked them.

For some reason as a kid being a smart athlete didn't seem like the right thing, because you didn't fit in. You didn't want to be too smart because you'd be a nerd. But then you didn't want to be too dumb either because then you didn't get the grades you needed to play.

People aren't autonomous creatures. They're under a lot of pressure themselves.

Girls, if a boy says something that isn't funny, you don't have to laugh.

Society will be obeyed; if you refuse obedience, you must take the consequences. Society has only one law, and that is custom. Even religion itself is socially powerful only just so far as it has custom on its side.

Conformity is the ape of harmony.