Andy Rooney Quotes

Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions.

Conscription is the cemetery where every vestige of your liberty is to be buried.

The need for a non-veteran reserve became painfully obvious in the Korean war when many of the men who were being called to serve were World War II veterans participating in Ready Reserve units.

Experience has taught me that any kind of political grouping is oppressive. It's the blind mass that crushes the individual.

I loved the bootcamp and the training. It was the actual Navy and the structure after it that I realized wasn't for me because they're building soldiers. It's a system, and you can't really stick out; you can't be the oddball out in the military.

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

Congress have a right by the Constitution to raise regular armies, and no restraint is imposed on the exercise of it …. It would be absurd to suppose that Congress could not carry this power into effect otherwise than be accepting the voluntary service of individuals.

... we might better reexamine the reasons for entering the war than abolish volunteers and substitute for them men dragged into the ranks by draft.

All able bodied male citizens … are hereby declared to be the National Forces.

In an over-organized society, the individual is altogether crushed out of existence. He gains the whole wealth of social thought around him and loses his own soul.

Because conscription appeals to essentially no one, the United States has lived with the All-Volunteer Force since the end of the Vietnam War.

Nobody's unique. Everybody copies off of each other. Everybody wears the same type of stuff. Nobody's an individual anymore.

Conformity is dangerous.

Schoolchildren make up their own rules and enforce their own conformities. They feel safest when leisure time is rationed and dosed. They like to wear uniforms, and they frown on personal idiosyncrasies. Deviance is the mark of an outsider.

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

Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.

Once you don't have freedom and you're obliged to do many things you don't want, and it becomes a routine, then your identity is at stake because you can feel that you are not anymore yourself, that you are what they want you to be - and you can lose yourself.

The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.

With the daguerreotype, everyone will be able to have their portrait taken . . . and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same.

People have only one way to be.

Failing conventionally is the route to go; as a group, lemmings may have a rotten image, but no individual lemming has ever received bad press

The business world worships mediocrity. Officially we revere free enterprise, initiative and individuality. Unofficially we fear it.

Of what use is it to please the herd? They are simply coarse animals - for all that is admirable in man is the artificial product of special breeding.

I feel like someone is pressing me into a mold that does not fit my body, forcing me intothe wrong shape.