Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Comment on this quote Share via Email Print this Page [41-60] of 83 Conformity quotesConformity QuotesConformity Previous 20 quotes Next 20 quotes Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.~ Gotthold Ephraim Lessing Any single man must judge for himself whether circumstances warrant obedience or resistance to the commands of the civil magistrate; we are all qualified, entitled, and morally obliged to evaluate the conduct of our rulers. This political judgment, moreover, is not simply or primarily a right, but like self-preservation, a duty to God. As such it is a judgment that men cannot part with according to the God of Nature. It is the first and foremost of our inalienable rights without which we can preserve no other.~ John Locke New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.~ John Locke No man escapes When freedom fails, The best men rot in filthy jails; And they who cried: “Appease, Appease!” Are hanged by men they tried to please.~ Hiram Mann Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.~ Mignon McLaughlin It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.~ Herman Melville And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.~ H. L. Mencken The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.~ H. L. Mencken The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society.~ H. L. Mencken The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have.~ H. L. Mencken The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues, and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else...Their purpose, in brief, is to make docile and patriotic citizens, to pile up majorities, and to make John Doe and Richard Doe as nearly alike, in their everyday reactions and ways of thinking, as possible.~ H. L. Mencken Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.~ H. L. Mencken A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.~ John Stuart Mill You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.~ Octave Mirbeau When it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.~ John Viscount Morley If none of us ever read a book that was “dangerous,” had a friend who was “different,” or joined an organization that advocated “change,” we would all be the kind of people Joe McCarthy wants.~ Edward R. Murrow In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary.~ Kathleen Norris The essence of a free life is being able to choose the style of living you prefer free from exclusion and without the compulsion of conformity or law.~ Eleanor Holmes Norton There’s a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any over-large concentration of like-minded individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.~ P. J. O'Rourke Natural liberty is the right of common upon a waste; civil liberty is the safe, exclusive, unmolested enjoyment of a cultivated enclosure.~ William Paley Previous 20 quotes Next 20 quotes Share on Facebook Tweet Email Print