Tom Selleck Quotes

Whoever has an original thing to say, it is sort of a threat to the status quo.

Wherever I see people doing something the way it's always been done, the way it's 'supposed' to be done, following the same old trends, well, that's just a big red flag to me to go look somewhere else.

An understandable prejudice of intellectual life leads us to view tilters at orthodoxy as courageous front-line innovators.

I have an almost complete disregard of precedent, and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things have always been done. I defy the tyranny of precedent. I go for anything new that might improve the past.

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.

I'm content to stand on tradition. I'm even more content to wipe my feet on it.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

I would say any behavior that is not the status quo is interpreted as insanity, when, in fact, it might actually be enlightenment. Insanity is sorta in the eye of the beholder.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

Every single person, pretty much, is taught what they're supposed to do: go to school, get a job, find someone to love, get married, have kids, raise the kids, and then die. Nobody questions that. What if you want to do something different?

Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.

I always wanted to go against hat grain because it was too restricting.

I don't want to follow the herd.

Only dead fish go with the flow.

To talk of resisting what is called public opinion as a crime, is to make Socrates an anarchist and Jesus Christ a felon.

Public opinion, a vulgar, impertinent, anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for anyone who is not content to be the average man.

Action requires co-operation, but in general if you set your face against custom, people will set their faces against you. They cannot tell whether you are right or wrong, but they know that you are guilty of a pragmatical assumption of superiority over them which they do not like.

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

In America there is not one single element of civilization that is not made to depend, in the end, upon public opinion.

Most Americans never work as hard as when they're trying to appear normal, and in New Orleans, we just don't bother with that.

The people that were most interesting were always questioning the status quo.

I think that, in terms of mainstream storytelling, the rebel gets off way too easy. We're way too hard on the insiders and way too soft on the outsiders.

It depends on who you talk to if I'm part of the establishment or part of the antiestablishment.

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 label of tasteful or tasteless is so often used to silence people and to maintain the status quo. It's used to shame people for not following the commonly accepted routine, for not aligning themselves with the status quo.