David Riesman Quotes

All men are different. And should do everything possible to continue to be so.

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

You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.

We are all different, and should do what we can do te remain so.

We should know mankind better if we were not so anxious to resemble one another.

I don't want to live up to how people expect me to be.

The reason most people don't express their individuality and actually deny it, is not fear of what prime ministers think of us or the head of the federal reserve, It's what their families and their friends down at the bar are going to think of them.

Pop music allows you to be who you are without having to wear a social uniform or to conform, which some people find impossible to do.

People are so scared to really voice who they are. They want to be politically correct. Just scared to see what other people's perceptions are.

Being put in a group, I hate that. I don't think anyone likes it. Everyone just wants to be their own person.

Society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.

The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to be like each other.

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.

Everyone is being told by society to talk this way, to dress that way, to be this person or to be that person, and it's so important to just maintain a sense of self.

It isn't till now, in the American Century, as we have recklessly dubbed it, that tribal pressures toward conformity have been brought to bear so ruthlessly upon men and women seeking to work creatively.

In our society, no one dares to be themselves.

I like the freedom America has. In Japan people tend to think too much about others' opinions and how to be like everybody else but to Americans it seems more important to be who you are and find your own way.

It's nice to stand out and not have to conform to all the beauty standards that just don't even make sense anymore.

I'm not a blender. I don't like people who blend into society.

What grows from our head is something that we should love. The larger society can love it or not, but it's not their decision to make.

No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.

A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity.

Man is a unique individual. He can never be put in a system where he becomes just another notch. Another nail.

Apparently God makes us all different. Some of us are happy to respond to His individual touch on our lives by remaining individuals, and others of us are intimidated or frightened into trying to become like each other so that we have company, so that we don't feel so lonely.

Perhaps even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual most. His very "uniqueness," "separateness" and "differentiation" make him an alien, not only in his native place, but even in his own home. Often more so than the foreign born who generally falls in with the established.