Julia Butterfly Hill Quotes

Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers.

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.

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.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

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.

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.

Some people just use beautiful things to just shop or to have a tribal feeling - 'Oh, blah, blah, blah, I'm wearing Hermes; blah, blah, blah, I'm wearing Saint Laurent; blah-blah blah' - because it's like a need, a tribe, recognition: 'Ahh, my Rolex.' But I run away from anything which is too recognizable - it's my nature.

The world chooses to think what the world thinks.

We all get swept up in the hype machine. Nobody is immune to that.

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

When people are free to do as we please, they usually imitate each other.

Popular opinion is the biggest 'filter' for most people - they don't have to try something if they've already been told it's not cool.

Conformity is the ape of harmony.

Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry.

Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts.

If we attach more importance to what other people believe than to what we know to be true - if we value belonging over being - we will not attain authenticity.

The problem is that we humans are deep conformists.

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

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.

I don't like the trappings of stardom. I wear the shoes and the Dolce & Gabbana, because I'm told to. But I'm not trapped by it.

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

It's no secret that in our society, and many before, people are trend followers. For some reason, they feel better about themselves if they are dressed in the latest fashion or have the newest tech gadget.

Fame or perceived success - it all comes from groupthink.

I think a lot of young kids at school are very conscious of trying to keep credibility in case they kind of stand out in a crowd and get bullied by trying to stay cool and stuff. And my whole thing, all the way through school, was I was just a goof... I didn't care.