Susan Sontag Quotes

In society, there is enormous pressure for us to try and look good, to be politically correct, to say the right things, to be polite and basically to sacrifice ourselves on the way.

The framework of men's wear is so narrow, that when you play at the edges you get labeled.

I never wanted to be aligned to a mature group because they go off and become politicians and stuff.

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

People are going to behave however the social norms permit, and beyond that.

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

Most people live their life around what other people do.

The whole system of society tells you what to do.

We all just kinda did everything we thought we were supposed to do and girls dated the guys they were supposed to and did things with the guys they were supposed to.

We have been obliged to respond to the compulsions of our society.

The masses, the public, is too strict.

It was a stifling society with government controlling all aspects of life. You could not get funding for any sort of project. There was no infrastructure to support you. And there were a lot of social pressures to just take a government job and have some babies, and that’s it.

Consciously or unconsciously most of us adhere to what is expected of our role because we realize our social success depends on this. Some may refuse to play this game, but in the end they are marginalized and forced to play the outsider role, with limited options and decreasing freedom as they get older.

My mother's mantra was, 'How would it look to the neighbors?' And so you don't do anything because you're worried about how it would look to the neighbors.

Tradition is nothing but ancestral peer pressure.

Heavens! whatever possesses us, here below, that we mutually torment ourselves, sourly reproach our mutual faults, and mercilessly condemn all that is not cut according to our pattern?

As long as you don't fly openly in the face of society, society doesn't ask any inconvenient questions; and it makes precious short work of the cads who do. There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.

In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense.

Some people are afraid to dress in ways that they actually like because it might be different than what most people expect or how others dress.

When someone else accepts you, that's when you begin to see yourself - through THEIR eyes - and you begin to realize that there may actually be many qualities to like about yourself.

No one should have to conform to some mythical concept of the ideal family.

People like you to be something, preferably what they are.

Most men have at least one redeeming feature. Finding one for Brother Rike requires a stretch. Is 'big' a redeeming feature?

I don't want to hear any words like that while I'm here. Scout, you'll get in trouble if you go around saying things like that. You want to grow up to be a lady, don't you?' I said not particularly.

Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs.