Charles Dudley Warner Quotes

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.

Society will be obeyed; if you refuse obedience, you must take the consequences. Society has only one law, and that is custom. Even religion itself is socially powerful only just so far as it has custom on its side.

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.

When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.

Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.

There's kind of this real social pressure to not argue about things.

The whole system of society tells you what to do.

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?

Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs.

Society values cooperation over independence, obedience over individuality, and niceness above all else.

Deviants are sacrificed to increase group solidarity

The more defensive a society, the more conformist.

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.

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.

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

Often we don't notice the stringent rules to which our culture subjects us.

Society is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

Peer pressure and social norms are powerful influences on behaviour, and they are classic excuses.

I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps.

We're led to believe everybody opposes it and disagrees with political correctness, but yet everybody's scared to death of it. So who is it? Well, it's the power structure wherever you happen to be.

Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

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.

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.