Kathy Acker Quotes

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.

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.

Group conformity scares the pants off me because it's so often a prelude to cruelty towards anyone who doesn't want to - or can't - join the Big Parade.

There are too many conservatives who are terrified of being labelled. They're afraid of being labelled, and they're afraid of being not liked.

I think what we have in this country is a little more dangerous in a way because it can't be seen fully. It's sorta internal censorship. We censor each other.

Down through the centuries, this trick has been tried by various establishments throughout the world. They force people to get involved in the kind of examination that has only one aim and that is to stamp out dissent.

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

You cannot change the conclusion of the brain by torture, nor by social ostracism. But I will tell you what you can do by these and what you have done. You can make hypocrites by the million.

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.

For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous. Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings - all the human actions we think of as essential to a character - had be censored by the self lest they be punished by the state.

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

People can undergo a sudden change of thinking and loyalties under threat of death or intense social pressure and isolation from friends and family.

There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.

It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.

I worry that we are approaching a time when that which is shocking is squeezed out by the Stalinism of political correctness.

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.

A big element of what they regard as conformity is simply a desire to have an audience.

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 world chooses to think what the world thinks.

I know how easy it is for some minds to glide along with the current of popular opinion, where influence, respectability, and all those motives which tend to seduce the human heart are brought to bear.

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.

You're not allowed to step out of whatever the rules are, politically, or socially, and they'll get you for it, they'll hunt you down. That's the really frightening thing.

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

When the people have no other tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one.

Few people can resist doing what is universally expected of them. This invisible pressure is more difficult to stand against than individual tyranny.