Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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

The voice of authority speaks not for the one but for the many; authority figures have a strong and rapid effect on social norms in part because they change our assumptions about what other people think.

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.

Society is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has.

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.

My message isn't perfectly defined. I have, as a human being, fallen to peer pressure.

The masses, the public, is too strict.

We're all taught to blend in and behave.

When we find ourselves in groups or with charismatic individuals, we might do things we wouldn't ordinarily do.

Who says what is the right way and what isn't? That is some imagined social construct that people made up to feel okay about being average.

Conformity is the ape of harmony.

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.

People are always going to identify with what it's like living in society and have people judge you in certain ways, and how you can be strong enough to be your own person and all those good things.

We are more likely to cheat if we see others doing so. We tend to conform to accepted norms of reasonable behaviour, rather than adhere to strict rules.

He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave.

First of all, whoever didn't want to be a member of this association or the other association, was branded, you know, like a dangerous individualist, you know, infected by the Western decadence, you know. So everybody joined.

Young people in my generation were sort of in lockstep, and it wasn't just the '40s, either. In the '30s and in the '50s it was the same. No one ever dropped out unless he got sick or got kicked out.

Success brings with it pressure to conform. I always thought that success would lead to freedom, but the opposite is true: more people get involved, and committees make decisions, and it becomes a fight to stay free.

Peer pressure and social norms are powerful influences on behaviour, and they are classic excuses.

I am a believer and a conformist.

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

The reason most people don't express their individuality and actually deny it, is not fear of what prime ministers think of us or the head of the federal reserve, It's what their families and their friends down at the bar are going to think of them.

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