Iliza Shlesinger Quotes

The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head.

Group conformity scares the pants off me because it's so often a prelude to cruelty towards anyone who doesn't want to - or can't - join the Big Parade.

To rebel against a powerful political, economic, religious, or social establishment is very dangerous and very few people do it, except, perhaps, as part of a mob. To rebel against the “scientific” establishment, however, is the easiest thing in the world, and anyone can do it and feel enormously brave, without risking as much as a hangnail.

The moment you start asking questions, you become public enemy number one.

Even the best of us have certain psychological mechanisms that can suddenly kick in and turn us into monsters. That to me is the basic message of events like the rise of Nazism, the Salem witch trials, and so on: not that bad people do bad things, but that good people do bad things. It's distressingly easy for those mechanisms to be triggered, either consciously by demagogues, or naively by people who think they're trying to do the right thing. Which is why I think it's more akin to tic-tac-toe.

If you don't watch it people will force you one way or the other, into doing what they think you should do, or into just being mule-stubborn and doing the opposite out of spite.

The truth is . . . you think what people want you to think.

The oppression of any people for opinion's sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

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

A lot of people believe that if everybody just did what they were told - obeyed - everything would be fine. But that's not what life is all about. That's not real. It's never going to happen.

A man must know how to fly in the face of opinion; a woman to submit to it.

How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.

I didn't want to wear a checked shirt and grow a mustache - that's what you had to do, and everyone did.

I hate driving a bandwagon.

Persecution is the first law of society because it is always easier to suppress criticism than to meet it.

I am against the whole cliche of the moment.

I'm such a Goody Two-shoes, but I get a vicarious thrill at someone sticking it to the Man.

I have spent a great deal of my life being part of minorities. Some of the people I admire the most in the world have had the courage to defend, against wind and tide, minority viewpoints in those frightening times when any disagreement with universal conformity is identified as treason.

Some people still believe you should just fall in line with what's going on - and that's scary. It makes a mockery of freedom of speech.

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

The only behaviour that is truly common is to avoid doing something because you think others might consider it common.

Birds of a lawless, bigoted feather bully together.

The worst enemy of truth and freedom in our society is the compact majority.

I feel like that's so ingrained in so many children that you are so confined and repressed growing up that, anything you do, you have to rebel against it at some point.