Charles Peguy Quotes

Each man is afraid of his neighbor's disapproval - a thing which, to the general run of the human race, is more dreaded than wolves and death.

At the bottom of not a little of the bravery that appears in the world, there lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they have not the courage to face public opinion.

There is nothing that makes more cowards and feeble men than public opinion.

The reason most people don't express their individuality and actually deny it, is not fear of what prime ministers think of us or the head of the federal reserve, It's what their families and their friends down at the bar are going to think of them.

People sometimes are afraid to be who they are because of other people's ideals.

We're the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. Everybody's afraid to be thought in any way different from everyone else.

Must one dread what others dread?

Public opinion is always more tyrannical towards those who obviously fear it than towards those who feel indifferent to it.

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

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

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

Ridicule is a weak weapon when pointed at a strong mind; but common people are cowards and dread an empty laugh.

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.

The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

Most men are petrified of standing out in any way or being thought superficial.

You know, you can make a small mistake in language or etiquette in Britain, or you could when I was younger, and really be made to feel it, and it's the flick of a lash, but it would sting, and especially at school where there's not much privacy, and so on. You could, yes, undoubtedly be made to feel crushed.

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.

When cowardice is made respectable, its followers are without number both from among the weak and the strong; it easily becomes a fashion.

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.

Dress codes and gestures and attitudes have always inspired me, as has youth culture in general, although now I question it more. If you analyze youth cultures over history, there has always been something strict about them - you have to be like this or like that.

The world chooses to think what the world thinks.

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.

I just feel like in society and in public, we have this unspoken expectation that we're all trying to meet. And there's so much pressure to try to fit in.

In our society, no one dares to be themselves.

I wasn't like the rest of the kids. I was an artist. Living in a black society, when you're raised around a bunch of boys who plays sports and chase girls, there's this perception of masculinity that's super hard to fit into. I wasn't the stereotype of that like a lot of my peers were.