Rosalind Wiseman Quotes

The aspects of patriotism that hush dissent, encourage going along, and sanction comfortable distancing and compliance with what is indecent and unacceptable... those aspects are too fundamental to ignore or gloss over.

The undignified mania of adaptive conformity, exhibited by many of my kinsmen, has always been very repulsive to me.

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

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.

The race of man, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity.

We are so conformist; nobody is thinking. We are all sucking up stuff; we have been trained to be consumers, and we are all consuming far too much.

Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed.

The enemy of individuality is groupthink.

I don't like being surrounded by yes men.

I don't like it when people spout about the popular opinion just to make it louder.

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?

I've been amazed at how fast and herd-like opinions in the United States are.

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.

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

There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the Establishment - and nothing more corrupting.

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.

We get on the bandwagon in all sorts of ways - you know minor ways and major ways - like what you've just encountered which isn't censorship exactly, it was something sort of uglier in a way.

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.

People just don't realize how much peer pressure, the desire for peer acclamation, influences 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.

The world chooses to think what the world thinks.

I know how easy it is for some minds to glide along with the current of popular opinion, where influence, respectability, and all those motives which tend to seduce the human heart are brought to bear.

I always voted at my party's call, And never thought of thinking for myself at all.

… blind followers …

Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers.