Seth Godin Quotes

I love challenging the status quo.

The French higher education system has not adapted to this revolutionary period. [It] rewards people for their capacity to follow the path that is open to them. It does not encourage people to rebel or to develop their character.

One who accepts the general ideas of his time gets along smoothest, but he does least for progress.

The people that were most interesting were always questioning the status quo.

Bandwagons roll through our lives. It's up to you whether you jump on them unquestioningly or jump on them to overturn them and subvert them.

Wherever I see people doing something the way it's always been done, the way it's 'supposed' to be done, following the same old trends, well, that's just a big red flag to me to go look somewhere else.

Have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, "Is it reasonable?

… a controlled disrespect for authority is essential to a scientist.

I have a suspicion of lockstep and everyone looking in the same direction: that's a key character trait in me.

What did you learn in school that you still use today? Go ahead teachers, tell me. What? Fear, conformity, don't question authority.

I rarely accept things on blind faith, especially the orthodoxy of any given practice, or any given practicum. I'm like, "Oh come on. Is this the way to do things?"

I was an ordinary boy at school, a young man. In fact, what did the headmaster once say? "You're constantly challenging those in authority; questioning and challenging those in authority." Which was not really the way I saw it. I felt there were questions that had to be answered, and things that weren't quite right.

The voices of conformity speak so loudly. Don't listen to them. No one does the right thing out of fear. If you ever utter the words, 'We've always done it that way,' I urge you to wash out your mouth with soap.

The people who oppose your ideas are inevitably those who represent the established order that your ideas will upset.

I'm appealing to people who want something different, but the world, on the whole, doesn't really embrace different things. Not on the whole.

I'm against fashionable thinking.

I think that every child grows up with the ideas that what we are given, is our society. Your education, and your mother and father, they tell you this is how it is, but then you hit adolescence and you think, 'Is it? Why? Why is it like that?' Sometimes that questioning leads to something more.

The supreme lesson of any education should be to think for yourself and to be yourself; absent this attainment, education creates dangerous, stupefying conformity.

I do like things that are not necessarily a reflection of what is considered the right thing by this culture. Somehow, promoting that status quo I find uninteresting.

I've always shied away from conventional wisdom, though I know the power of it.

I think I'm always trying to subvert conventions, and sometimes it's more successful than others.

I didn't have my parents to rebel against, but I had society, and that definitely is what they taught me. Just: Trust nothing.

Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic.

Sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger.

Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.