societal conformity Quotes

The collective dream is the hypnosis of social conditioning. Only sages, psychotics & geniuses manage to break free.

The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.

We insist that society should conform to our own subjective illusion of reality.

This whole society, up to now, has been very violent with the individual. It does not believe in the individual; it is against the individual. It tries in every possible way to destroy you for its own purposes. It needs clerks, it needs stationmasters, deputy-collectors, policemen, magistrates, it needs soldiers. It does not need human beings.

The individual has totally different interests from the society, because the society has no soul. The society is soulless. And if you become too much a part of the society, it will reduce your soul also to a non-entity. Beware, before you have lost your whole opportunity. Don't be a slave. Follow society to the point you feel is needed, but always remain master of your own destiny.

I must try to live in society and yet remain untouched by its pitfalls.

Again and again I am brought up against it, and again and again I resist it: I don't want to believe it, even though it is almost palpable: the vast majority lack an intellectual conscience; indeed, it often seems to me that to demand such a thing is to be in the most populous cities as solitary as in the desert.

All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny.

It [culture] invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue, and Hollywood, and what have you.

Another friend began to say, "Well, Quentin has a problem of adjusting himself to society and he..." This sentence was never finished. The ballet teacher expostulated, "I don't agree. Quentin does exactly as he pleases. The rest of us have to adapt ourselves to him."

A man should have the fine point of his soul taken off to become fit for this world.

If you look at life as a whole, we have to admit life's good where we live. But in an evil Twilight Zone kind of way there's nothing else to choose. In the old days there was always a Bohemia or a creative under-world to join if the mainstream life wasn't your bag - or a life of crime, or even religion.And now there's only the system. All other options have evaporated. For most people it's the System or what... death? There's nothing. There's no way out now.

Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.

It's basically the same in all periods of societies. If you belong to the majority, you can avoid thinking about lots of troubling things.' 'And those troubling things are all you /can/ think about when you're one of the few.' 'That's about the size of it,' she said mournfully. 'But maybe, if you're in a situation like that, you learn to think for yourself.' 'Yes, but maybe what you end up thinking for yourself /about/ is all those troubling things.

The busybodies have begun to infect American society with a nasty intolerance - a zeal to police the private lives of others and hammer them into standard forms - A Nation of Finger Pointers.

I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel - let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they’re doing. I’m concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that’s handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers.

Although images of perfection in people's personal lives can cause unhappiness, images of perfect societies - utopian images - can cause monstrous evil. In fact, forcefully changing society to conform to societal images was the greatest cause of evil in the twentieth century.

To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity.

History would indicate that the majority of people have always been sheep.

We need only think of the number of talented men who sooner or later make their apologies and concessions to philistinism, so as to be permitted to exist.

My whole life is a contradiction on purpose - to make you think. I think people have forgetten how to have their own opinions. They're always waiting for someone to tell them what to do and what to wear - it's so boring.

We are always getting ready to live, but never living... The wave moves onward but the particles of which it is composed do not... It cannot be but that at intervals throughout society there are real men intermixed . . . as the carpenter puts one iron bar in his bannister for every five or six wooden ones.

Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease.

The Normal is the good smile in a child’s eyes - all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults.

If you try to smooth out society with a hot iron, you're liable to drive out all talent.