Ric Ocasek Quotes

I don't want my reasons to be informed by what people think about what I'm doing.

I'm not in show business because I don't have to go to the meetings, I'm just not a part of it, I don't belong to it. When you "belong" to something. You want to think about that word, "belong." People should think about that: it means they own you. If you belong to something it owns you, and I just don't care for that. I like spinning out here like one of those subatomic particles that they can't quite pin down.

Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.

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

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

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

On the whole, I tend not to listen to my peers.

The enemy of individuality is groupthink.

He who fears to be out of the mode does not deserve to belong to himself.

Why should we pay so much attention to what the majority thinks?

You can't live your life to suit other people. The harder you try, the more restrictions they'll put on you just for the fun of seeing you jump through their hoops.

I don't belong to any side. What's more, I think flags are nothing but painted rags that represent rancid emotions. Just seeing someone wrapped up in one of them, spewing out hymns, badges and speeches, gives me the runs. I've always thought that anyone who needs to join a herd so badly must be a bit of a sheep himself

Be Sure you Are Stepping to the Music you Hear - No Matter what Other People Think.

"The man who alters his way of thinking to suit others is a fool." Our quote of the day is, from of all people, the Marquis de Sade, the most infamous writer in all of French literature. And by the way, if you recognized that quote, you're sick.

Change is freedom, change is life. It's always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don't make changes, don't risk disapproval, don't upset your syndics. It's always easiest to let yourself be governed. There's a point, around age twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities. Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls.

To be an individual is the hardest thing in the world, because nobody likes you to be an individual. Everybody wants to kill your individuality and to make a sheep out of you. Nobody wants you to be on your own.

I stopped looking at people's opinions. It's easy to get caught up in what other people think.

If one had to worry about one's actions in respect of other people's ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.

I don't want people to be inspired or offended by what I do. If you determine your behavior by what [other people] want, you're screwed.

Those who talk about individuality the most are the ones who most object to deviation, and in a few years it may be the other way around. Some day everybody will just think what they want to think, and then everybody will probably be thinking alike; that seems to be what is happening.

If we attach more importance to what other people believe than to what we know to be true - if we value belonging over being - we will not attain authenticity.

Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are?

Only people who carry the opinions of others need the support of others.

If you want to do something, then you do it. If you don't want to do something, don't just do it because your friends are doing it, or because all the popular kids are doing it.

I don't want to be influenced by outside opinion.