Bob Greene Quotes

Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts.

Just because so many conforming kids wake up every morning asking, 'What is everybody else going to wear today?' doesn't mean that they don't wish it were different. Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

I believe people think as a group more often than we might realize or care to admit. We like to believe that we act as individuals and nothing more, but time and again - in corporations and business, in politics and religion, in fashion and culture, and in friendships and social circles - we think and do as one.

You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men.

When people are free to do as we please, they usually imitate each other.

Popular opinion is the biggest 'filter' for most people - they don't have to try something if they've already been told it's not cool.

People say things they'll never do but then do them because they want to be a part of 'this great thing.'

There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends.

Conformity is the ape of harmony.

But when the group is literally capable of changing our perceptions, and when to stand alone is to activate primitive, powerful, and unconscious feelings of rejection, then the health of these institutions seems far more vulnerable than we think.

The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare.

The race of man, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity.

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.

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

A big element of what they regard as conformity is simply a desire to have an audience.

Conformism is a potent statement, and as much as we do talk about individuality in fashion, there's a sense that people are fearful of not conforming and not being part of action.

We live in a world that tells us not to care, to consume everything in sight. It tells us that being cool and being an individual actually means buying what everyone else is buying and doing what everyone else is doing.

The world chooses to think what the world thinks.

I know how easy it is for some minds to glide along with the current of popular opinion, where influence, respectability, and all those motives which tend to seduce the human heart are brought to bear.

The undignified mania of adaptive conformity, exhibited by many of my kinsmen, has always been very repulsive to me.

Men are herd animals, and prefer to go with the flow, especially when moving in the other direction is harsh.

Conformity--the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority.

Few people can resist doing what is universally expected of them. This invisible pressure is more difficult to stand against than individual tyranny.

Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers.