Rohinton Mistry Quotes

If I were to say what I really think I would be arrested or shut away in a lunatic asylum. Come on, I am sure that it would be the same for everyone.

I feel like that's so ingrained in so many children that you are so confined and repressed growing up that, anything you do, you have to rebel against it at some point.

If a community decides this is how you're going to dress and these are the punishments, who are we to say different?

Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

The gift of sobriety is clarity and a sense of connection - and travel only enhances that.

It is a retrogression when human beings begin to insist on uniform, on one-mindedness, on conditioning their offspring so that all their reactions are automatic.

Any society where it's a crime or a hassle to be different is a society based on psychological fascism.

When I'm working I don't have room to think about myself and my own issues. It's really freeing. There is no room for me, which is really nice.

It is remarkable how easily children and grown-ups adapt to living in a dictatorship organised by lunatics.

Even today, England is a very repressed, repressive country, and there's pressure to be kind of a certain way, so people do things that ultimately make them sad.

You're not allowed to step out of whatever the rules are, politically, or socially, and they'll get you for it, they'll hunt you down. That's the really frightening thing.

Disorder is the child of authority and compulsion. Liberty is the mother of order.

When the people have no other tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one.

The compulsions of the law seem to have been provided for those only who require compulsions

We do so much better when television isn’t watching.

A totalitarian society makes enormous demands on the courage of men, and a partially totalitarian society makes even greater demands because the general anxiety is greater.

In an over-organized society, the individual is altogether crushed out of existence. He gains the whole wealth of social thought around him and loses his own soul.

… obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame A mechanized automaton.

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

We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder “censorship,” we call it “concern for commercial viability.”

Those who fear men like laws.

When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find that far more, and far more hideous, crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.

In our society, no one dares to be themselves.