Japanese Proverb Quotes

The nail that sticks out gets knocked down.

The enemy of individuality is groupthink.

Conformity is the ape of harmony.

I grew up in a small town where everyone wanted to be the same or look the same and was afraid to be different.

I've always balked at anything that feels like a clique, even if it's not always in my best interest to do so. I like each individual, fedora-wearing hipster - it's just the greater gestalt that rubs me the wrong way.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

I didn't want to wear a checked shirt and grow a mustache - that's what you had to do, and everyone did.

Anyone who draws attention to himself as an individual, is viewed with suspicion. We acquired this tendency, of course, from America, and we must resist it: levelling, and imitation of what others are already doing.

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

Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.

It is a retrogression when human beings begin to insist on uniform, on one-mindedness, on conditioning their offspring so that all their reactions are automatic.

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

In a society of ideological believers, nothing is more ridiculous than the individual who doubts and does not conform.

The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime.

So long as a minority conforms to the majority, it is not even a minority.

Is uniformity of opinion desirable? No more than of face and stature.

Society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.

That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.

Woe betide the man who refuses to conform.

It's perfect to be the same as everyone else.

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.

Conformity will be the only virtue and any man who refuses to conform will have to pay the penalty.

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.

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