Paul Eldridge Quotes

Scientists who play by someone else's rules don't have much chance of making discoveries.

Just because Galileo was a heretic doesn't make every heretic a Galileo.

The great challenge which faces us is to assure that, in our society of big-ness, we do not strangle the voice of creativity, that the rules of the game do not come to overshadow its purpose, that the grand orchestration of society leaves ample room for the man who marches to the music of another drummer.

All art is based on non-conformity.

You have to learn the rules to be able to know how to break them.

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.

Ideation is not a synonym for innovation, conformity is not its simple antonym, and innovation is not the automatic consequence of "creative thinking.".

My whole generation's mission is to kill the cliche...it's one of the reasons a lot of my generation are always on the fence about things. They're afraid to commit to anything for fear of seeming like a cliche. They're afraid to commit to their lives because they see so much of the world as a cliche.

Only the self-sufficient stand alone - most people follow the crowd and imitate.

It's very conventional to say that you're a contrarian these days.

It's boring to be like everybody.

The world in general disapproves of creativity, and to be creative in public is particularly bad. Even to speculate in public is rather worrisome.

I think there's always a call for people who are bucking the norm.

A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.

I like seeing how people have succeeded when others would have presumed they would have failed, and others just go along with whatever everyone else does.

If everybody likes you, you are not a very interesting person.

Style is originality; fashion is fascism. The two are eternally and unalterably opposed.

The business community wants remarkable advertising, but turns a cold shoulder to the kind of people who can produce it. That is why most advertisements are so infernally dull.... our business needs massive transfusions of talent. And talent, I believe, is most likely to be found among nonconformists, dissenters, and rebels.

It is to the eccentrics that the world owes most of its knowledge.

I always thought that if I was popular I must be doing something wrong.

It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set.

I just tend to admire people who go for what they believe in, like David Lynch for example, and just say what goes through their heads, and are not afraid of people not accepting them. I have no respect for people who deliberately try to be weird to attract attention, but if that's who you honestly are, you shouldn't try to "normalize yourself". It's a fine line.

Angry contradiction of the patriarch is not creativity; it's delinquency calling for attention. Difference for the sake of difference is as empty an achievement as slavishly following the commercial imperative.

To be like other people is to be unlike ourselves.