Chaim Potok Quotes

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

I am against the whole cliche of the moment.

If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist, it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity.

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

Consensus is what many people say in chorus but do not believe as individuals.

In a society of ideological believers, nothing is more ridiculous than the individual who doubts and does not conform.

So long as a minority conforms to the majority, it is not even a minority.

It is long since I have learned to hold popular opinion of no value.

Those who differ most from the opinions of their fellow men are the most confident of the truth of their own.

Being a wiseass in a groupthink environment is like throwing an egg at a bulldozer.

How could I be anything but a dissenter? Who wants the opinion of a group?

It would be positively boring if minds were in tune.

Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are?

It were not best that we should all think alike.

I think there's always a call for people who are bucking the norm.

Never underestimate the stimulation of eccentricity.

Don't you get tired of seeing so many "non-conformists" with the same non-conformist look?

My prodigious sin was, and still is, being a non-conformist. Although I am not a Communist I refused to fall in line by hating them.

Talk what you will of taste, my friend, you'll find two of a face as soon as of a mind.

...most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right.

When you're the first person whose beliefs are different from what everyone else believes, you're basically saying, "I'm right, and everyone else is wrong." That's a very unpleasant position to be in. It's at once exhilarating and at the same time an invitation to be attacked.

I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions.

Our civilization represses not only "the instincts", not only sexuality, but any form of transcendence. Among one-dimensional men, it is not surprising that someone with an insistent experience of other dimensions, that he cannot entirely deny or forget, will run the risk either of being destroyed by the others, or of betraying what he knows.

I think anything you do that's different, that doesn't take the typical approach, invites differing opinions.

There's nothing is this world more instinctively abhorrent to me than finding myself in agreement with my fellow-humans.