Frank Gehry Quotes

I have a suspicion of lockstep and everyone looking in the same direction: that's a key character trait in me.

[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.

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.

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.

That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.

Most people resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers

All the better; they do not force me to do anything that I would not have done of my own accord if I did not dread scandal. But since they want it that way, I enter gladly on the path that is opened to me, with the consolation that my departure will be more innocent than was the exodus of the early Hebrews from Egypt.

One of the guiding beliefs of our consuming age is that we are all free and independent individuals. That we can choose to do pretty much what we want, and if we can't, then it's bad. But at the same time, co-existing alongside this, there is a completely different, parallel universe where we all seem meekly to do what those in power tell us to do.

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?

The violence of our time is caused by obedience.

Sheep. I'm stuck in a boarding school filled with sheep.

nothing is more restful than conformity.

That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality.

As far as I have seen, at school...they aimed at blotting out one's individuality.

The atmosphere of the home is prolonged in the school, where the students soon discover thatin order to achieve some satisfaction they must adapt to the precepts which have ben set from above. One of these precepts is not to think.

People have only one way to be.

You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.

I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel - let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they’re doing. I’m concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that’s handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers.

Sadly, children's passion for thinking often ends when they encounter a world that seeks to educate them for conformity and obedience only.

It's mind control, see. You have to go to school, get those exams, get to university or college, get a job, get married, don't miss the boat, do it now or you'll shoot your life down the drain. Yeah. They got you as soon as you were born. They never risked a second of your life. When you have kids they'll be telling them they have to wear a plastic mask and put a penny in the slot about their nose before they can breathe in.

The only distinction that democracies reward is a high degree of conformity.

Competition impedes creativity because you present yourself in a way that's going to been seen by somebody outside of you. You're not very much yourself and it limits you.

Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws - always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up.

The resistance is the voice in your head telling you to use bullets in your PowerPoint slides...It’s the voice that tells you to leave controversial ideas out of the paper you’re writing, because the teacher won’t like them. The resistance pushes relentlessly for you to fit in.

The constant pressure to bring about conformity is a dangerous thing.