Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

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.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

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

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.

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

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

If we attach more importance to what other people believe than to what we know to be true - if we value belonging over being - we will not attain authenticity.

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

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

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.

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.

Fame or perceived success - it all comes from groupthink.

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.

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

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.

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.

The only behaviour that is truly common is to avoid doing something because you think others might consider it common.

Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?

We get on the bandwagon in all sorts of ways - you know minor ways and major ways - like what you've just encountered which isn't censorship exactly, it was something sort of uglier in a way.

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.

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.