Ant Middleton Quotes

People just don't realize how much peer pressure, the desire for peer acclamation, influences them.

If you are at a boys' school, especially, there is a level of bravado that you have to keep up otherwise you'll get picked on.

I got a lot of flak; in Texas, football is not only the social thing you must do, but you do it also to prove your manhood. They all couldn't conceive of why I'd want to stop to do 'The Importance of Being Earnest.'

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.

People like you to be something, preferably what they are.

Like most people, I have painful memories of trying to fit in as a child. I wore, said, and did pretty much what everyone else did.

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.

The conformist understands that the reason of his desperate look for conformism is that he realises he is different and that he never accepted his difference.

I've always balked at anything that feels like a clique, even if it's not always in my best interest to do so. I like each individual, fedora-wearing hipster - it's just the greater gestalt that rubs me the wrong way.

First of all, whoever didn't want to be a member of this association or the other association, was branded, you know, like a dangerous individualist, you know, infected by the Western decadence, you know. So everybody joined.

Peer pressure and social norms are powerful influences on behaviour, and they are classic excuses.

I think everyone in their life has some point on their life wanted to be like everybody else or wanted to be like the captain of the football team.

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

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.

Where I come from, you don't really dance, you know. I think I was at the age, where, I suppose, I wanted to do what all me friends were doing. I gave up dancing for a while, and then I realised I wasn't as good at football as I thought I was.

Conformism is a potent statement, and as much as we do talk about individuality in fashion, there's a sense that people are fearful of not conforming and not being part of action.

And the inner dynamics of Hollywood are like politics. Say you give a script to a group of executives - they all sit around, afraid to voice an opinion, saying nothing, waiting to know what the consensus is. Just like focus groups, opinion polls or a cabinet.

Everybody wants to be like everybody else.

Adolescence is when girls experience social pressure to put aside their authentic selves and to display only a small portion of their gifts.

There's kind of this real social pressure to not argue about things.

I'd spent seven years in an all-boys school: 2,000 adolescents in the same khaki uniforms striking hunting poses, stalking lunchrooms, classrooms, changing rooms, looking for boys who didn't fit in.

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.

I go not back of the convention, to make distinctions among its’ members.

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

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.