Jean de la Bruyere Quotes

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.

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

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

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

Most people live their life around what other people do.

Everybody thinks that I did this and I did that, but I just went along with the times.

The world chooses to think what the world thinks.

There's kind of this real social pressure to not argue about things.

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.

Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion.

A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually

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

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.

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

Everyone is friends with each other, and you have to like what's hot. You have to do all these things as if there's no real feelings. As if you can't dislike something any more. We all just have to be buddy-buddy.

Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry.

Everybody's private motto: It's better to be popular than right.

I think I was a pretty normal student; I just followed most of my friends.

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.

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.

Fame or perceived success - it all comes from groupthink.

Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal - a sort of 'voting' situation. But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.

First of all, whoever didn't want to be a member of this association or the other association, was branded, you know, like a dangerous individualist, you know, infected by the Western decadence, you know. So everybody joined.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.