Learned Hand Quotes

Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers.

Conformity is dangerous.

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.

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

Everybody wants to be like everybody else.

In a society of ideological believers, nothing is more ridiculous than the individual who doubts and does not conform.

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.

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

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

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.

We need more people speaking out. This country is not overrun with rebels and free thinkers. It's overrun with sheep and conformists.

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

Nothing is as approved as mediocrity, the majority has established it and it fixes it fangs on whatever gets beyond it either way.

Group conformity scares the pants off me because it's so often a prelude to cruelty towards anyone who doesn't want to - or can't - join the Big Parade.

Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.

Unanimity of opinion is characteristic of savages and civilization only advances as more and more people have the right to call wrong what the majority calls right..

So long as a minority conforms to the majority, it is not even a minority.

It is always easy to take a position when society agrees with you. It is hard to take a position that everyone else in society disagrees with.

That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.

Dissenters will become food for crocodiles.

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.

Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.

If people knew the details about terrorism, they would not leave the house.

Woe betide the man who refuses to conform.

I think cultures of conformity produce vast quantities of shame, both in people who simply can't conform and people who do conform, but underneath, they're not feeling conformist.