Seneca the Younger 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.

Fashion is not public opinion, or the result of embodiment of public opinion. It may be that public opinion will condemn the shape of a bonnet, as it may venture to do always, and with the certainty of being right nine times in ten: but fashion will place it upon the head of every woman in America; and, were it literally a crown of thorns, she would smile contentedly beneath the imposition.

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.

Human beings are a social species. We like to hang together in groups, just like wildebeests, just like lions. Wildebeests don't hang with lions because lions eat wildebeests. Human beings are like that. We do what that group does that we're trying to identify with.

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

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

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.

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

Most guys in high school wore clothes seen only by their classmates. I wore clothes seen by the world.

Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

I still don't like authority exercised without reason. But they laugh at you at Cambridge if you say that sort of thing. For them, the law is a system of rules not that different from mathematics.

The whole system of society tells you what to do.

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

Let us then, dear friends, forever bow down to the general reason of society.

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

The young always have the same problem – how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.

When you're younger, it's all about conformity and being easily influenced - especially in terms of fashion. You just follow the trends. Whatever is hot at the moment, you want to get it. You basically just want to be doing what everyone else is doing. But as you get older, those things aren't as important.

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.

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?

Fashion is the great governor of this world; it presides, not only in matters of dress and amusement, but in law, physic, politics, religion, and all other things of the gravest kind; indeed, the wisest of men would be puzzled to give any better reason why particular forms in all these have been at certain times universally received, and at others universally rejected, than that they were in or out of fashion.

Sanity is a matter of culture and convention. If it's a crazy culture you live in, then you have to be irrational to want to conform. A completely rational person would recognize that the culture was crazy and refuse to conform. But by not conforming, he is the one who would be judged crazy by that particular society.

I am sick of being the victim of trends I reflect but don't even understand.

If the reason for doing something is that everyone else is doing it, it's not a good enough reason.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

Even our beliefs have become trend statements. We don’t even believe things because we believe them anymore. We only believe things because they are cool things to believe.