Louis MacNeice Quotes

Some people still believe you should just fall in line with what's going on - and that's scary. It makes a mockery of freedom of speech.

The enemy of individuality is groupthink.

Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.

Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.

The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.

Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.

Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.

Since I was 9, I'd been told what to say, what to think.

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.

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

I think a lot of people have lost respect for the individual, you know, the individual, the person who doesn't conform.

The nail whose head is sticking up get hammered down.

If we try and make out of the American people a people of one mind and one mold, we're through.

Society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism.

I see the 'z' in 'Humanz' as referring to robots, AI, programming, brainwashing, indoctrination. And it's a question to us: are we human, or are we humanz? Have we lost the ability to think for ourselves? Do we just believe what we're told? That's how I see it.

Conformity is dangerous.

One cannot evolve from one's robothood until one realizes how totally one has been robotized.

Any attempt to replace a personal conscience by a collective conscience does violence to the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism.

Those who talk about individuality the most are the ones who most object to deviation, and in a few years it may be the other way around. Some day everybody will just think what they want to think, and then everybody will probably be thinking alike; that seems to be what is happening.

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.

You cannot change the conclusion of the brain by torture, nor by social ostracism. But I will tell you what you can do by these and what you have done. You can make hypocrites by the million.

I grew up in a small town where everyone wanted to be the same or look the same and was afraid to be different.

I was seen in earlier years by family members and people of authority as somebody wasting his time. I had trouble with the restrictions of conformity. It made me edgy.