Sue Grafton Quotes

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.

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

Conformity is the ape of harmony.

'He who seeks may easily get lost himself. It is a crime to go apart and be alone.' Thus speaks the herd.

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've never been one to tear the social fabric.

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.

There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.

It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.

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.

Teach him to think for himself? Oh, my God, teach him rather to think like other people!

We are half ruined by conformity, but we should be wholly ruined without it.

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

The nail that sticks out gets knocked down.

Let us then, dear friends, forever bow down to the general reason of society.

The individualism of the Arab has been erased from this society.

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

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.

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

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?

Society will be obeyed; if you refuse obedience, you must take the consequences. Society has only one law, and that is custom. Even religion itself is socially powerful only just so far as it has custom on its side.

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

The revolt against individualism naturally calls artists severely to account, because the artist is of all men the most individual; those who were not have been long forgotten.