Louise J. Kaplan Quotes

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.

Just because so many conforming kids wake up every morning asking, 'What is everybody else going to wear today?' doesn't mean that they don't wish it were different. Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

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.

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

How can we choose to selectively follow what we find comfortable and attack anybody who tries to break free from the norms that we choose to set?

Conformity is the ape of harmony.

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

The constant pressure to bring about conformity is a dangerous thing.

I grew up in a small town where everyone wanted to be the same or look the same and was afraid to be different.

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.

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

I don't like to be different; I would like to be the same.

First of all, whoever didn't want to be a member of this association or the other association, was branded, you know, like a dangerous individualist, you know, infected by the Western decadence, you know. So everybody joined.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

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

Bandwagons roll through our lives. It's up to you whether you jump on them unquestioningly or jump on them to overturn them and subvert them.

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.

Conformism is a potent statement, and as much as we do talk about individuality in fashion, there's a sense that people are fearful of not conforming and not being part of action.

None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world.

There's kind of this real social pressure to not argue about things.

I think a lot of people have lost respect for the individual, you know, the individual, the person who doesn't conform.

Everything's always about being homogenized and following in a group. The people who stand out always have the most problems.

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

When I was growing up, everyone dressed the same. You had to have bootcut pants and chunky heels.

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