Joe Nichols Quotes

A wise politician will never grudge a genuflexion or a rapture if it is expected of him by prevalent opinion.

Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you're not really interested in order to get where you're going.

The whole force of the respectable circles to which I belonged, that respectable circle which knew as I did not the value of security won, the slender chance of replacing it if lost or abandoned, was against me.

Society has taught us to suppress certain things and not do certain things.

Change has to come. It's not always what you'd like. It's what other people like.

I won't be a pundit because you have to be saying certain things that you might not even want to, but you have to.

Failing conventionally is the route to go; as a group, lemmings may have a rotten image, but no individual lemming has ever received bad press

A woman who does not know herself has no choice other than to live with other people’s evaluations. But no one can adapt perfectly to public opinion. And herein lies the source of their destruction.

Every politician must be able to keep both feet on the fence with his ear to the ground.

If one had to worry about one's actions in respect of other people's ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.

An individual who stands out, or disagrees or takes risks is a danger to such systems and is effortlessly and, unconsciously sidelined.

I sometimes call this our "spacesuit self" because we come into an environment that is difficult and challenging, where we're told to be different. We're told to jump over hoops to be loved and appreciated, so we have to develop spacesuit strategies to get approval and create ways to avoid being judged.

Mix sheer hypocrisy with mediocrity, You play it safe every time.

Men have a trick of coming up to what is expected of them, good or bad.

Faced with the opportunity to become the category of one, we almost always hesitate, almost always compromise, almost always dumb it down to play it a little bit safer

Well if you can’t get what you love, You learn to love the things you’ve got .. If you can’t be what you want, You learn to be the things you’re not .. If you can’t get what you need, You learn to need the things that stop you dreaming

What man thinks of changing himself so as to suit his wife?

If I look at the mass I will never act.

For those of us who got into good colleges or the professions, did we stand up to that high school history teacher who told us some ridiculous lie about American history and say, "That's a ridiculous lie. You're an idiot"? No. We said, "All right, I'll keep quiet, and I'll write it in the exam and I'll think, yes, he's an idiot." And it's easy to say and believe things that improve your self-image and your career and that are in other ways beneficial to yourselves.

If you have any question in your mind, don't do it. If you go in thinking it's going to fix something that's wrong, don't do it.

Proverbial wisdom counsels against risk and change. But sitting ducks fare worst of all.

Knowing when to keep your mouth shut is invariably more important than opening it at the right time.

Compromise is not popular. It's not at all popular among young people who these days call themselves "activists." They think compromises are dishonest, opportunistic, humiliating. Not in my vocabulary.

The trouble with this world is that everybody has to compromise and conform.

He must understand that if he is the world's finest plum and someone he loves does not like plums, he has the choice of becoming a banana. But he must be warned that if he chooses to become a banana, he will be a second rate banana. But he can always be the best plum.