Jerry Spinelli Quotes

I just feel like in society and in public, we have this unspoken expectation that we're all trying to meet. And there's so much pressure to try to fit in.

Young people in my generation were sort of in lockstep, and it wasn't just the '40s, either. In the '30s and in the '50s it was the same. No one ever dropped out unless he got sick or got kicked out.

Everybody wants to be like everybody else.

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

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

Young people want to look like peas in a pod, and there is no use trying to make them different.

I also think that there's a little peer pressure. They probably think that a majority of people their age think the same things and they want to be considered - I don't know what the word is - in, hip, whatever, with that bunch. I think time will take care of some of this as it is revealed that [Donald] Trump is not what they think.

If we attach more importance to what other people believe than to what we know to be true - if we value belonging over being - we will not attain authenticity.

The problem is that we humans are deep conformists.

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.

At every point I am besieged by people who would like me to conform to some social norm of whatever sort of social group they expect me to be a part of. I never have any identification with these social groups.

Peer pressure and social norms are powerful influences on behaviour, and they are classic excuses.

The race of man, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity.

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.

A big element of what they regard as conformity is simply a desire to have an audience.

Most people live their life around what other people do.

I believe people think as a group more often than we might realize or care to admit. We like to believe that we act as individuals and nothing more, but time and again - in corporations and business, in politics and religion, in fashion and culture, and in friendships and social circles - we think and do as one.

Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

You might as well play at the show everyone else is playing at.

You see something happen to a population whereby everyone adopts something that's just preposterous in a way that makes it normal instantly. If any one person prior to the rash of puka shells, for example, was seen wearing puka shells, he would look like an idiot. But when everyone is wearing them, it instantly makes them normal.

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.

My message isn't perfectly defined. I have, as a human being, fallen to peer pressure.

I felt that there were so many people doing it that I would just be like one of the others.

Conformity--the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority.