Samuel Johnson Quotes

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

I've noticed that most people tend to go through life preserving their differences from others.

I'm not unusual; it's the others who are strange.

While most trudge through their days straight-jacketed in the social compact, living for others as much as or more than for themselves, a select few excel.

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.

You try to be yourself, do only what you've always done and like to do, and right away, you're tagged as an oddball.

Most of us are too enmeshed in communities to live our ideals. Outsiders have less to lose.

There are those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behaviour and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity.

Not everybody needs to be a weirdo.

People call me all kinds of things, I guess, because I'm a little different. I'm never what they expect.

How can we choose to selectively follow what we find comfortable and attack anybody who tries to break free from the norms that we choose to set?

I feel like the most human among us are the weirdest among us. Those voices can be the most creative and the most special. You look around at your parents, your friends, your aunts and uncles, and you realize nobody is normal.

You have to be a freak in order to be different.

A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity.

Eccentricity is not, as some would believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.

Eccentricity is originality that leads nowhere.

The reason they want you to fit in... is that once you do, then they can ignore you.

If you are normal, I intend to be a freak for the rest of my life.

Abnormal, adj. Not conforming to standard. In matters of thought and conduct, to be independent is to be abnormal, to be abnormal is to be detested.

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.

Before you can be eccentric, you must know where the circle is.

A man is called affected, nowadays, if he dresses as he likes to dress. But in doing that he is acting in a perfectly natural manner. Affectation, in such matters, consists in dressing according to the views of one's neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of the majority, will probably be extremely stupid.

In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by "thou shalt not", the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by "love" or "reason", he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.

Conformity to a sick society is to be sick.

The biggest teenage taboo is being strait-laced. It's easy to tell a researcher you went to a house party that turned into an orgy. It's less easy to say you like eating toast and watching QI.