Janet Frame Quotes

Everywhere you look, there's someone doing your thinking for you and telling you what to think and when to think of it.

Beware, all too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see.

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 human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.

Man's great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to.

In my preaching the shafts are ever aimed at the brainwashed horde.

In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.

An army environment is very protected, a walled city kind of environment, where everybody has the same income, you have the same birthday parties, you are given return gifts - everything is the same. Everybody is moving up at the same pace.

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

The Pentagon isn't a place that champions individuality and innovation.

I think in reality, today, if you use the same tools as everyone else, you kind of build the same products.

I do everything that everybody else does.

The cookie-cutter liberal, the standard operating procedure liberal, is really a giant ignoramus. I mean that seriously. They're really ignorant.

When I was growing up, everyone dressed the same. You had to have bootcut pants and chunky heels.

I think for me, wearing the helmet and being part of the Stormtroopers felt so strange. Like, so this is what it feels like to just be one of the many. And to look the same, and to have to do the same thing. To be under the same orders. This is what it feels like.

If we all dress alike, we might as well all work in cubicles.

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

Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched?

I want everybody to think alike. I think everybody should be a machine.

A multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to the common mold.

Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.

In the West, you don't get in any trouble if you tell the truth, but you still can't do it. Not only can't you tell the truth, you can't think the truth. It's just so deeply embedded, deeply instilled, that without any meaningful coercion it comes out the same way it does in a totalitarian state.

We're all getting lashed to the great wheel of uniformity.

Anymore, no one's mind is their own.

People at the top are closing ranks so tightly that all possibility of subjective deviation has gone, and difference can be sought only in the more distinguished cut of an evening dress.