Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes

With a small town mentality, you make a decision very early on as to whether you are going to do everything by the book or just go your own way and not care.

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

You're not allowed to be an eccentric in the world, you have to fit it.

It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.

Basically, I hate conformity. I hate people telling me what to do. It makes me want to smash things. So-called normal behaviour patterns make me so bored, I could throw up!

We're in a very individual sport, but they like us not to be so individual. They'd rather have you look like every other cookie cutter guy and have you believe that you're replaceable when you're really not.

Who says what is the right way and what isn't? That is some imagined social construct that people made up to feel okay about being average.

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

A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity.

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.

Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched?

We are human beings, not ants.

Man is a unique individual. He can never be put in a system where he becomes just another notch. Another nail.

Control over consciousness cannot be institutionaliz ed. As soon as it becomes part of a set of social rules and norms, it ceases to be effective in the way it was originally intended to be.

Most people don't lead their own lives - they accept their lives

There's no thought given to the individual because there aren't any individuals in socialism; everybody's the same.

'He who seeks may easily get lost himself. It is a crime to go apart and be alone.' Thus speaks the herd.

We're all getting lashed to the great wheel of uniformity.

We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.

Men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.

The man who gives his own decisions priority over society is a criminal.

We are entering a new world in which we can choose to follow our own steps, not those that society forces us to take.

There is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone.

Efficiency obliterates identity

The society wants you to have beautiful personalities; the society wants you to have personalities which are comfortable for the society, convenient for the society. But the person is not the real thing, the individual is the real thing. The individual is not necessarily always comfortable to the society - in fact he is very inconvenient.