Vivienne Westwood Quotes

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

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

The hazing experience and then the subsequent participation in the group forces its members to maintain the status quo and traditions at all costs. It demands mindlessness and unquestioned loyalty, resulting in boring people who have little ability to think for themselves or have an opposing viewpoint from those who have the most social power.

It's very scary to me that people actually think we should just follow our leaders. If we can't learn from our history, we're nowhere.

Activities that seem to represent choices are often inert reproductions of accepted practice.

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

I'm afraid Japanese people tend to collective hysteria.

The aspects of patriotism that hush dissent, encourage going along, and sanction comfortable distancing and compliance with what is indecent and unacceptable... those aspects are too fundamental to ignore or gloss over.

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 enemy of individuality is groupthink.

In every generation, there's a strong tendency for everyone to think like everyone else.

Beware, all too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see.

I've been amazed at how fast and herd-like opinions in the United States are.

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.

Man as an individual is a genius. But men in the mass form the headless monster, a great, brutish idiot that goes where prodded.

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

I always find myself very distrustful of intense crowd phenomena, and I think those are things that we should always try to question, especially critically.

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think.

To do exactly as your neighbors do is the only sensible rule.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

Unfortunately what came out of it was also kind of an imitation community with a lot of mindless conformity.

Everything is so aggressively marketed at every age: if you're not in Baby Gap, you're not cool. That's how everybody's grown up, so they don't even know it could be another way.

The world chooses to think what the world thinks.