Jacque Fresco Quotes

The conception of what is normal varies not only with the culture but also within the same culture, in the course of time.

We are more sensible of what is done against custom than against nature.

If you are really spontaneous, people will think you are mad. If you go to a tree and start talking, or to a flower, people will think you are mad. If you go to a church and talk to a cross or to an image, nobody will think your are mad, they will think that you are religious. You are talking to a stone in a temple and everybody thinks you are religious because this is the authorized form.

I was always fascinated by people who are considered completely normal, because I find them the weirdest of all

The world thinks eccentricity in great things is genius, but in small things, only crazy.

We were born in this society, we grew up in this society. And we learn to be like everyone else, playing nonsense all the time.

What makes sovereign ugliness are our conventions.

Normal is all relative.

Is anyone human actually normal? I'm beginning to think being normal is actually abnormal.

Custom determines what is agreeable.

Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world - we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.

I got tired of doing battle with people thinking I was a little weird because I wasn't in a band making happy, stilted music. The only people who really seem weird to me are people who think they're normal. People who think it's possible to be normal just by doing the same things that most people do. Is there a most people? I don't know. Television makes it seem like there is, but I think that might just be television.

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.

Everybody sacrifices something in an attempt to reach what they think society wants.

People want you to be ordinary.

Everything you think you're supposed to feel even, or do. When it doesn't match up with what everything that the culture is telling you to do, you feel like a failure.

Reality is not so much what happens to us; rather, it is how we think about those events that create the reality we experience. In a very real sense, this means that we each create the reality in which we live.

... it is a great mistake to confuse conventionality with simplicity ... it takes a good deal of intelligence and a great many inhibitions to follow a social code.

Perhaps what you call conventionality, I call decency.

It takes far more courage to violate a custom than a law.

Propriety is the least of all laws, and the most observed.

How far should one accept the rules of the society in which one lives? To put it another way: at what point does conformity become corruption? Only by answering such questions does the conscience truly define itself.

Our modern ideas of 'functioning' through things are really quite inhuman. We have this idea that no matter what is going on we still have to color between the lines, act normal.

The customs and practices of life in society sweep us along.