Victor Hugo Quotes

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

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.

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.

You see something happen to a population whereby everyone adopts something that's just preposterous in a way that makes it normal instantly. If any one person prior to the rash of puka shells, for example, was seen wearing puka shells, he would look like an idiot. But when everyone is wearing them, it instantly makes them normal.

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

Public opinion is no more than this. What people think that other people think.

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

When all run by common consent into vice, none appear to do so.

The voice of authority speaks not for the one but for the many; authority figures have a strong and rapid effect on social norms in part because they change our assumptions about what other people think.

We laugh at sheep because sheep just follow the one in front. We humans have out-sheeped the sheep, because at least the sheep need a sheep dog to keep them in line. Humans keep each other in line. And they do it by ridiculing or condemning anyone who commits the crime, and that’s what it’s become, of being different.

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.

I'd rather look ridiculous when everybody else does than plain and sensible all by myself.

Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent.

The only law which is really lived up to wholeheartedly and with a vengeance is the law of conformity.

Human beings are a social species. We like to hang together in groups, just like wildebeests, just like lions. Wildebeests don't hang with lions because lions eat wildebeests. Human beings are like that. We do what that group does that we're trying to identify with.

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

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.

When I was a kid, I was afraid of large group of conforming people.

Society is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has.

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.

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.

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

To do exactly as your neighbors do is the only sensible rule.

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.