Thomas Mars Quotes

In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.

There are those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behaviour and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity.

They yell at me to be dignified. But what are the dignified people like? The people who are held up as examples of me? They are snobs. Frightful snobs I'm a curiosity in Hollywood. I'm a big freak, because I'm myself!

He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave.

Conforming is not cool.

Respectability? Who wants to be respectable? That's spoken like a true loser.

We don't want to be the standard thing. We're more interested in having people hate us than glaze over us. We'd rather have a reaction than be in the middle.

These are the days when men of all social disciplines and all political faiths seek the comfortable and the accepted; when the man of controversy is looked upon as a disturbing influence; when originality is taken to be a mark of instability; and when, in minor modification of the original parable, the bland lead the bland.

Style is originality; fashion is fascism. The two are eternally and unalterably opposed.

Respectability offends my taste.

I went to public school for like, one day. I don't get it. Everybody tries to be exactly the same. I think being an outsider is a good thing.

The worst thing I can be is the same as everybody else. I hate that.

You were once wild here. Don't let them tame you.

At every point I am besieged by people who would like me to conform to some social norm of whatever sort of social group they expect me to be a part of. I never have any identification with these social groups.

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.

People are always going to identify with what it's like living in society and have people judge you in certain ways, and how you can be strong enough to be your own person and all those good things.

Normal is fading away. Governments and industries and schools like normal, because it's easier, it scales and it's profitable. But people don't like it - we want to be who we are, not who some marketer tells us to be.

I don't imagine my parents are too excited about my kind of life. The surrounding weirdness bothers them. Still, I think they're pretty good. Their lives are based on what their friends think, just like ours are.

I am against the whole cliche of the moment.

I have never felt the constraints of social acceptability.

In the U.S., you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.

I didn't want to look distinguished; I wanted to look fun, and also to fade into the street, into the King's Road. If I don't fade into a room at White's, that's fine. My father was chairman of Brooks' and the Beefsteak, and I was brought up in that life, and it bores me rigid.

The only behaviour that is truly common is to avoid doing something because you think others might consider it common.

Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?

Now, in music, it seems more like the popular crowd suppresses anyone who is different.