Bruce Cockburn Quotes

I have always been mainstream. It's so weird, because I don't see it as something negative at all. So many people see it as something negative.

I am perfectly capable of writing things about myself that one doesn't discuss in polite company, but I was raised by people who said you don't discuss politics, you don't discuss religion, and you certainly don't discuss people's sex lives.

I didn't rebel in the way a lot of people do.

I'm not really rebellious. People think I am, but I'm not.

With a small town mentality, you make a decision very early on as to whether you are going to do everything by the book or just go your own way and not care.

I wore a coat and tie all through high school: my way of being rebellious in the late 1950s.

Basically, I hate conformity. I hate people telling me what to do. It makes me want to smash things. So-called normal behaviour patterns make me so bored, I could throw up!

To me, in life, if there's, like, a rule, and I think it's ridiculous, then of course I'll circumvent that but also point out how ridiculous the rule is. Other than that, if I go to a concert, and my seat is Row G, Seat 12, I'm sitting in Row G, Seat 12. I don't care if I'm with five other friends, I'm supposed to be in Seat 12, that's my seat.

L.A. is uninhibited: You're encouraged to express yourself, wear what you want, do what you want, and to speak from a very emotionally honest place. D.C. is different. In Washington, you have to be much more careful about what you say and do. Especially about what you wear!

Society wants to put us in a box and say, OK, you do this and you do that and you do this, and I'm like, no, I like this, I like that.

All in all you're just another brick in the wall

Never was a cornflake girl; Thought it was a good solution: hanging with the raisin girls.

Conformity to a sick society is to be sick.

You can’t be a non-conformist if you don’t wear the proper uniform.

I'm not extra sensitive to handshakes. I shake hands all the time.

Yes, faith; it is my cousin's duty to make curtsy and say 'Father, as it please you.' But yet for all that, cousin, let him be a handsome fellow, or else make another curtsy and say 'Father, as it please me.

Didn't this beat everything? A pretty and an ugly taking a stroll together. The warden came closer, confusion all over his middle-pretty face. Tally smiled. At least she was causing trouble to the end. "I'm Tally Youngblood," she said. "Make me pretty.

You can't be creative and still be a good girl.

You cannot lay down a standard which all must follow.

Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them with your favorite colors.

Why do only the awful things become fads? I thought. Eye-rolling and Barbie and bread pudding. Why never chocolate cheesecake or thinking for yourself?

Cover that bosom that I must not see: souls are wounded by such things.

When people say they do not care what others think of them, for the most part they deceive themselves. Generally they mean only that they will do as they choose, in the confidence that no one will know their vagaries; and at the utmost only that they are willing to act contrary to the opinion of the majority because they are supported by the approval of their neighbours. It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set.

Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me and the damned world can go to hell.

One of the saddest things about conformity is the ghastly sort of non-conformity it breeds; the noisy protesting, the aggressive rebelliousness, the rigid counter-fetishism.