Henry David Thoreau Quotes

In an over-organized society, the individual is altogether crushed out of existence. He gains the whole wealth of social thought around him and loses his own soul.

Not easily may an individual escape the deep slavery of the herd.

I do not like Moscow life. You live here not as you want to live, but as old women want you to.

We should not be comfortable or content in a society where the only way to remain free of surveillance and repression is if we make ourselves as unthreatning, passive, and compliant as possible.

No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.

In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by "thou shalt not", the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by "love" or "reason", he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.

The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.

Society is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has.

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.

Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander.

Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

Unless you hit your television with a sledgehammer, you're not going to be able to be an individual.

Teach him to think for himself? Oh, my God, teach him rather to think like other people!

Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society…

Society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.

Every individual wishes the rest to live after his own mind, and to approve what he approves, and reject what he rejects.

The public must be put in its place, so that it may exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may live free of the trampling and roar of a bewildered herd.

The human race is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it.

Individualism is a formidable lie.

Conformity is dangerous.

We were born in this society, we grew up in this society. And we learn to be like everyone else, playing nonsense all the time.

That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality.

I got the idea [for Anthem's theme] in my school days, in Soviet Russia, when I heard all the vicious attacks on individualism, and asked myself what the world would be like if men lost the word 'I.'

Christians call it faith ... I call it the herd.