Scott Adams Quotes

I grew up in a very conservative home.

They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called "work" in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking "outside the box"; and when they die they are put in a box.

The school was prone to dishing out punishments for anything creative that didn't fit with expectation - I just followed the logic and figured the folk club was probably much the same.

An army environment is very protected, a walled city kind of environment, where everybody has the same income, you have the same birthday parties, you are given return gifts - everything is the same. Everybody is moving up at the same pace.

Overregulation stifles creativity. It smothers innovation. It gives dinosaurs a veto over the future.

I had very strict parents, I could never go outside or go to parties.

Bureaucracy kills people's ability to try new ideas.

Growing up in a small town, in the Midwest, and Catholic - those are sort of three layers of repression.

My father was very strict, a very militant parent, because he wanted us to be very focused kids. He sold the televisions, so we didn't watch TV. And he didn't want any music playing that wasn't gospel or inspirational music. In fact, he didn't even like a lot of gospel because he thought it was too bluesy.

The university is well structured, well tooled, to turn out people with all the sharp edges worn off, the well-rounded person. The university is well equipped to produce that sort of person, and this means that the best among the people who enter must for four years wander aimlessly much of the time questioning why they are on campus at all, doubting whether there is any point in what they are doing, and looking toward a very bleak existence afterward in a game in which all of the rules have been made up, which one cannot really amend.

You cannot lay down a standard which all must follow.

We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.

So far, we do not seem appalled at the prospect of exactly the same kind of education being applied to all the school children from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but there is an uneasiness in the air, a realization that the individual is growing less easy to find; an idea, perhaps, of what standardization might become when the units are not machines, but human beings.

There are many well-meaning people today who work at placing an economic floor beneath all of us so that no one shall exist below a certain level or standard of living, and certainly we don't quarrel with this. But look more closely and you may find that all too often these well-meaning people are building a ceiling above which no one shall be permitted to climb and between the two are pressing us all into conformity, into a mold of standardized mediocrity.

McDonald's is the ultimate symbol of passive conformity.

Americans are getting like a Ford car, they all have the same exact parts, the same upholstering and make exactly the same noises.

Organizations, by their very nature are designed to promote order and routine. They are inhospitable environments for innovation.

Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.

Our educational system now teaches every kid the same thing. It's like rubber stamping!

[On School Uniforms] Don't these schools do enough damage making all these kids think alike, now they have to make them look alike too? It's not a new idea, either. I first saw it in old newsreels from the 1930s, but it was hard to understand because the narration was in German.

Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative, to denumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.

When your parents regulate everything you hear and everything you intake, it forces you to get creative in other ways.

There is no more wild, free, vigorous growth of the forest, but everything is in pots or rows like a rococo garden... The pupil is in the age of spontaneous variation which at no period of life is so great. He does not want a standardized, overpeptonized mental diet. It palls on his appetite.

The idea was to have a basin inverted on his head and his hair cut to the shape of it. Skill and money were not needed. Then the idea grew that it was more convenient to leave the basin on his head. Stray thoughts were trimmed along with stray hair; brain-vines, tentacles of thought, were not encouraged to wander. Then, in the interests of human economy, the head of adaptable man became a basin of uniform shape—a basin, a crash helmet. Safe at last; no more thought-cuts.

Here in the enclave, one didn't prosper by demonstrating too much independent thought.