Henry Ward Beecher Quotes

At the bottom of not a little of the bravery that appears in the world, there lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they have not the courage to face public opinion.

Everybody's private motto: It's better to be popular than right.

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

I had grown tired of standing in the lean and lonely front line facing the greatest enemy that ever confronted man – public opinion.

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

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.

Fame or perceived success - it all comes from groupthink.

Ridicule is a weak weapon when pointed at a strong mind; but common people are cowards and dread an empty laugh.

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.

When cowardice is made respectable, its followers are without number both from among the weak and the strong; it easily becomes a fashion.

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.

You never know when you're going to be considered un-hip... The people that really pass judgment on you really have nothing to do with what you do, usually.

It’s not hard to be popular if you take a poll to find out what it means to be popular.

Understand: as children and young adults, we are taught to conform to certain codes of behavior and ways of doing things. We learn that being different comes with a social price.

I just feel like in society and in public, we have this unspoken expectation that we're all trying to meet. And there's so much pressure to try to fit in.

Networks are operating from a fear base where it's all about playing the popularity game.

We shall never know how many acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of appearing not sufficiently progressive.

Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry.

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

It is often easier as well as more advantageous to conform to other men's opinions than to bring them over to ours.

It takes no courage to say or do what's popular.

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.

I think a lot of young kids at school are very conscious of trying to keep credibility in case they kind of stand out in a crowd and get bullied by trying to stay cool and stuff. And my whole thing, all the way through school, was I was just a goof... I didn't care.

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.