Conformist Society Quotes

Our dangers ... are not from the outrageous but from the conforming.

I think that once you've produced a conformist, a totally conformist society, a society in which there were no critics, that would in fact be an exact equivalent of the totalitarian societies against which we are supposed to be fighting in a cold war.

The idea was to have a basin inverted on his head and his hair cut to the shape of it. Skill and money were not needed. Then the idea grew that it was more convenient to leave the basin on his head. Stray thoughts were trimmed along with stray hair; brain-vines, tentacles of thought, were not encouraged to wander. Then, in the interests of human economy, the head of adaptable man became a basin of uniform shape—a basin, a crash helmet. Safe at last; no more thought-cuts.

This is the problem with the world today: Nobody wants to take risks, to risk being themselves.

There were no political ideas. It was an apolitical time. It was the '50s and in the privilege of the suburbs.

The trouble with normal is it always gets worse, fashionable fascism dominates the scene.

In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.

The image of all the cars leaving pastel-colored people at the same time has never really left me as an anti-ambition for life!

While children are struggling to be unique, the world around them is trying all means to make them look like everybody else.

How rarely I meet with a man who can be free, even in thought! We all live according to rule. Some men are bedridden; all world-ridden.

In a society of ideological believers, nothing is more ridiculous than the individual who doubts and does not conform.

Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.

When I talk about my artist parents, people imagine a bohemian environment and think, 'Aha, so that's where he gets it from!' But we were as white, straight, and middle-class as the next family on our white, straight, middle-class housing estate.

Political freedom is to be cherished indeed. But there is no political freedom that is not indissolubly bound to the inner personal freedom of the individuals who make up that nation: no liberty of a nation of conformists, no free nation made up of robots.

The common person fears to think beyond the common.

I think that certainly the artists of the '40s, '50s and '60s were fighting a very conformist society, which didn't give them enough space to live or create, and they were bucking all kinds of spoken and unspoken rules.

They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called "work" in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking "outside the box"; and when they die they are put in a box.

The first virtue of a young man today - that is, for the next fifty years perhaps, as long as we live in fear, and religion has regained its powers - is to be incapable of enthusiasm and not to have much in the way of brains.

A multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to the common mold.

In the New World, happiness is enforced.