Adam Grant Quotes

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.

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

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

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.

Bandwagons roll through our lives. It's up to you whether you jump on them unquestioningly or jump on them to overturn them and subvert them.

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

Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?

Everything's always about being homogenized and following in a group. The people who stand out always have the most problems.

Basically, I hate conformity. I hate people telling me what to do. It makes me want to smash things. So-called normal behaviour patterns make me so bored, I could throw up!

To rebel against a powerful political, economic, religious, or social establishment is very dangerous and very few people do it, except, perhaps, as part of a mob. To rebel against the “scientific” establishment, however, is the easiest thing in the world, and anyone can do it and feel enormously brave, without risking as much as a hangnail.

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.

Woe betide the man who refuses to conform.

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?

Conformity is dangerous.

Have you ever been going somewhere with a crowd and you're certain it's the wrong road and you tell them, but they won't listen, so you just have to plod along in what you know is the wrong direction till somebody more important gets the same idea?

Conformity is the ape of harmony.

The reason they want you to fit in... is that once you do, then they can ignore you.

Or about how when you're a child, to stop you from following the crowd you're assaulted with the line "If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?" but when you're an adult and to be different is suddenly a crime, people seem to be saying, "Hey. Everyone else is jumping off a bridge. Why aren't you?

I went to public school for like, one day. I don't get it. Everybody tries to be exactly the same. I think being an outsider is a good thing.

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

And from a military school which taught me that to fit into society, you can't just do anything you damn well please because it will suit you. And that it's much better to be with the winners than it is with the losers.

I think I'm a natural-born leader. I know how to bow down to authority if it's authority that I respect.

I'm not really rebellious. People think I am, but I'm not.

With a small town mentality, you make a decision very early on as to whether you are going to do everything by the book or just go your own way and not care.

The school was prone to dishing out punishments for anything creative that didn't fit with expectation - I just followed the logic and figured the folk club was probably much the same.