Conformist Quotes & Sayings

America ... has created a 'civilization' that represents an exact contradiction of the ancient European tradition. It has introduced the religion of praxis and productivity; it has put the quest for profit, great industrial production, and mechanical, visible, and quantitative achievements over any other interest. It has generated a soulless greatness of a purely technological and collective nature, lacking any background of transcendence, inner light, and true spirituality. America has [built a society where] man becomes a mere instrument of production and material productivity within a conformist social conglomerate — Julius Evola

I am a believer and a conformist. — Georges Rouault

The job is not the work. — Seth Godin

I don't think playing it safe constitutes a retreat, necessarily. In other words, I don't think if, by playing safe he means we are not going to delve into controversy, then if that's what he means he's quite right. I'm not going to delve into controversy. Somebody asked me the other day if this means that I'm going to be a meek conformist, and my answer is no. I'm just acting the role of a tired non-conformist. — Rod Serling

Not long ago, a hat was a conformist accessory. Then the 1960s came along, and young people didn't want to wear hats. — Philip Treacy

I think it's too bad when teenagers become conformist in terms of fashion,because it's the ideal time to go off into your own crazy thing without looking completely idiotic. — Clemence Poesy

Not so much because many occupations would not permit of a loving attitude, but because the spirit of a production-centered, commodity-greedy society is such that only the non-conformist can defend himself successfully against it. Those who are seriously concerned with love as the only rational answer to the problem of human existence must, then, arrive at the conclusion that important and radical changes in our social structure are necessary, if love is to become a social and not a highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon. — Erich Fromm

But the frat boys were all frivolous and idiotic in our minds now, a bunch of conformist fools going through the motions of hip. — Bill Ayers

The key to all aristeia and wisdom and gnosis is a seed that conformist and mediocritist and democratist Americans haven't got even a scintilla of a prospect of nourishing, and that is sapere aude: DARE TO BE WISE. — Kenny Smith

The cynic finds love with the idealist. The rebel with the conformist. The social butterfly with the bookworm. They help each other balance their lives. — Joyce Brothers

Coincidence is just a safe conformist for fate. — J.A. Redmerski

Don't you get tired of seeing so many "non-conformists" with the same non-conformist look? — Thomas Sowell

Chess is my profession. I am my own boss; I am free. I like literature and music, classical especially. I am in fact quite normal; I have a Bohemian profession without being myself a Bohemian. I am neither a conformist nor a great revolutionary. — Bent Larsen

I'm naturally quite conformist, really. If I go to a country and they say, "You've got to drive on the right," I'm not going to drive on the left to show that I'm different. I'm able to stick to the law. — Robert Wyatt

Unshackled by strict yet arbitrary, misguided norms, outcasts can be, look, act, and associate however they want. And in this ever conformist, cookie-cutter, magazine-celebrity-worshipping, creativity-stifling society, the innovation, courage, and differences of the cafeteria fringe are vital to America's culture and progress. Which is why we must celebrate them. — Alexandra Robbins

When a man becomes a conformist, he is sacrificing the richness of independent thinking. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Government provided free tuition tends more and more to produce a uniform conformist education, with college faculties ultimately dependent for their jobs on the government, and so developing an economic interest in profession and teaching a statist, pro-government, and socialist ideology. — Henry Hazlitt

Conformist intellectuals, the ones who support official aims and ignore or rationalize official crimes, are honored and privileged in their own societies, while the value-oriented are punished in one way or another. The — Noam Chomsky

The courage to be as oneself within the atmosphere of Enlightenment is the courage to affirm oneself as a bridge from a lower to a higher state of rationality. It is obvious that this kind of courage to be must become conformist the moment its revolutionary attack on that which contradicts reason has ceased, namely in the victorious bourgeoisie. — Paul Tillich

We'll have for a president a symbolic Rebel against his own power whose election was underwritten by inhuman soulless profit-machines whose takeover of American civic and spiritual life will convince Americans that rebellion against the soulless inhumanity of corporate life will consist in buying products from corporations that do the best job of representing corporate life as empty and soulless. We'll have a tyranny of conformist nonconformity presided over by a symbolic outsider whose very election depended on our deep conviction that his persona is utter bullshit. A rule of image, which because it's so empty makes everyone terrified - they're small and going to die, after all - — David Foster Wallace

The intellectual world is deeply conformist ... We talk a lot about the crimes of others. When it comes to our own crimes, we are nationalists in the Orwellian sense. — Noam Chomsky

Coincidence is just the conformist term for fate. — J.A. Redmerski

Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your roadmap through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die. — John Taylor Gatto

Only conformists are ever adored. — Catherine Breillat

A man must consider what rich realms he abdicates when he becomes a conformist — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A lot of singers find a musical genre people like and stick with it. That's being a conformist. I sing ballads, rock, salsa, rap. — Thalia

The conformist understands that the reason of his desperate look for conformism is that he realises he is different and that he never accepted his difference. — Bernardo Bertolucci

Schools are generally feminine places, institutions where conformity is valued, taught largely by conformist women. — Judith M Bardwick

Chic, is first, when you don't have to prove you have money, either because you have a lot and it doesn't matter or because you don't have any and it doesn't matter. Chic is not aspirational. Chic is the most impossible thing to define. Luxury is a humorless thing, largely, and when humor happens in luxury it happens involuntarily. Chic is all about humor. Which means chic is about intelligence. And there has to be oddness-- most luxury is conformist, and chic cannot be. Chic must be polite and not incommode others, but within that it can be as weird as it wants. — Luca Turin

I am a believer and a conformist. Anyone can revolt; it is much more difficult to obey our inner promptings. — Georges Rouault

Even if we're not doing anything wrong, there are certain things we want to do that we don't think can withstand the scrutinizing eye of other people. And those are often the most important things that we do. The things we do when other people are watching are things that are conformist, obedient, normal, and unnotable. — Glenn Greenwald

What always made me proud - almost blushing with pride - is that Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg all told me that 'The Conformist' is their first modern influence. — Bernardo Bertolucci

Communism was something so hideous that you had to be an exceptional conformist or a fool not to see the evil around you. — Donald Tusk

My characteristics as a scientist stem from a non-conformist upbringing, a sense of being something of an outsider, and looking for different perceptions in everything from novels, to art to experimental results. I like complexity and am delighted by the unexpected. Ideas interest me. — Peter C. Doherty

The deviant and the conformist ... are creatures of the same culture, inventions of the same imagination. — Kai Theodor Erikson

There is none more conformist than one who flaunts his individuality. — Rabih Alameddine

Our effectiveness depends on our capacity to be audacious and astute, clear and appealing. I would hope that we can create a language more fearless and beautiful than that used by conformist writers to greet the twilight. — Eduardo Galeano

( ... the non-conformist, how do you keep from getting scarred?)/i don't! i got a scar here ... and uh i got a scar on my knee ... and uh a few scars on my soul. — Marlon Brando

Our legal system, including the police, is anti-Dalit and anti-poor. The death penalty laws' wrathful majesty, in blood-shot equality, deals the fatal blow on the poor not the rich, the pariah not the brahmin, the black not the white, the underdog not the top dog, the dissenter not the conformist ... The law barks at all but bites only the poor, the powerless, the illiterate, the ignorant. — V. R. Krishna Iyer

We see ourselves as nonconformist, but I think all of this is creating a more conformist, conservative age. — Jon Ronson

I learned the word non-conformist in fourth grade and immediately announced that I would grow up to become one. — Nick Offerman

No one can possibly achieve any real and lasting success or 'get rich' in business by being a conformist. — J. Paul Getty

Linde's Danger to Self is a warm, candid and appealing account of being an emergency room psychiatrist. Linde captures the non-conformist, hard-boiled style of the psychiatrists who work in this setting. — Tanya Luhrmann

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. — Malcolm Muggeridge

No matter how quiet and conformist a person's life seems, there's always a time in the past when they reached an impasse. A time when they went a little crazy. I guess people need that sort of stage in their lives. — Haruki Murakami

America was not built by conformists, but by mutineers. — Jim Hightower

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. — Anne Roiphe

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

CRIP: I'm a non-conformist, and nothing's ever easy for me. — Scott Hildreth

In the streets outside everything was still. The hour before five was the only time of day this city slept. In my earlier life, during the twelve years I had lived in Bergen I used to stay up at night as often as I could. I never reflected on this, it was just something I liked and did. It had started as a student ideal, grounded in a notion that in some way night was associated with freedom. Not in itself but as a response to the nine-to-four reality which I, and a couple of others, regarded as middle-class and conformist. We wanted to be free, we stayed up at night. Continuing with this had less to do with freedom than a growing need to be alone. This, I understood now, I shared with my father. In the house where we lived he had a whole studio apartment to himself and he spent more or less every evening there. The night was his. — Karl Ove Knausgard

The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left. — Orson Welles

School is very conformist, and one of the very first conforming that goes on in preschool and kindergarten is gender. — Dan Savage

In light of this evidence, Bryan suggests that we should embrace nouns more thoughtfully. "Don't Drink and Drive" could be rephrased as: "Don't Be a Drunk Driver." The same thinking can be applied to originality. When a child draws a picture, instead of calling the artwork creative, we can say "You are creative." After a teenager resists the temptation to follow the crowd, we can commend her for being a non-conformist. When we shift our emphasis from behavior to character, people evaluate choices differently. Instead of asking whether this behavior will achieve the results they want, they take action because it is the right thing to do. In the poignant words of one Holocaust rescuer, "It's like saving somebody who is drowning. You don't ask them what God they pray to. You just go and save them. — Adam M. Grant

According to one influential wing of modern secular society there are few more disreputable fates than to end up being 'like everyone else' for 'everyone else' is a category that comprises the mediocre and the conformist, the boring and the suburban. The goal of all right-thinking people should be to mark themselves off from the crowd and 'stand out' in whatever way their talents allow. — Alain De Botton

And love can exist only in a rebellious heart. With the conformist, love cannot exist, because love is such a dangerous phenomenon. So these two things you have to remember -- that you are the sole authority for your being. Never lean upon crutches, and always decide what you are doing with full awareness.

So be a rebel and be in love: in love with life, in love with yourself, in love with people, in love with all that is available. That is god! A rebellious person necessarily becomes religious, and a loving person cannot miss god, because love is prayer. — Rajneesh

I think religion is a bunch of hooey, and I think that the holidays are an opportunity for people to get stressed out, getting their rush to shop. It's so conformist. — Ricky Martin

While my dad is a rebel at heart, I am a conformist. — Vivaan Shah

The medical profession is - and knows itself to be - endemically conservative and conformist. — Margaret Heffernan

Society's only real 'progressives' are the deviants and mutants. Look at evolution - fish who didn't deviate never became amphibians; frogs who didn't mutate never became reptiles; conformist snakes never became mammals , etc. Normal Humans will remain humans, and they'll be subjugated by the digital monsters of the next few millenia. — Jim Goad

Wild birds will kill exotic ones: the budgies and the lovebirds and the yellow canaries
escaped from their cages and hoping to get a taste of the sky
usually end up back on the ground, plucked raw by their more conformist cousins — Joanne Harris

Why is it that all non-conformists look the same? — Billy Corgan

Everyone is sinning, so it's no longer rebellious to sin. You're just a conformist if you're drunk; and naked; driving around in a loud motorcycle; smoking cigarrettes; breaking commandments; getting pregnant out of wedlock. Everyone's done that. That's so tired! — Mark Driscoll

A Conformist is a man who declares, "It's true because others believe it" - but an Individualist is NOT a man who declares, "It's true because I believe it."
An Individual declares, "I believe it because I see in reason that it is true. — Ayn Rand

The British cinema had been very dull and conformist. — Karel Reisz

Woe to him inside a non-conformist clique who does not conform to non-conformity. — Eric Hoffer

A time comes when silence is betrayal. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought, within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. — Martin Luther King Jr.

True individualists tend to be quite unobservant; it is the snob, the would be sophisticate, the frightened conformist, who keeps a fascinated or worried eye on what is in the wind. — Louis Kronenberger

Be neither a conformist or a rebel, for they are really the same thing. Find your own path, and stay on it — Paul A. Vixie

I wanted to have a reaction from the audience. I wanted to be able to talk to somebody, and not be talking just to myself. That's when I did 'The Conformist,' 'Last Tango in Paris,' etc. And I found it was incredibly rewarding, something new. — Bernardo Bertolucci

My prodigious sin was, and still is, being a non-conformist. — Charlie Chaplin

The character I have in view when I say "smug vulgarian" is, thus, not the part-time philistine, but the total type, the
genteel bourgeois, the complete universal product of triteness and mediocrity. He is the conformist, the man who
conforms to his group, and he also is typified by something else: he is a pseudo-idealist, he is pseudo-compassionate, he is
pseudo-wise. The fraud is the closest ally of the true philistine. All such great words as "Beauty," "Love," "Nature," "Truth,"
and so on become masks and dupes when the smug vulgarian employs them. — Vladimir Nabokov

It's easier to be conformist naturally; it's easier except for those who don't like conformism. — Elie Wiesel

It's the non-conformist who gives color to history. — Dorothy Fuldheim

As human beings we have unlimited potential and imagination. The worst thing you can do is be a conformist and buy into conformity. It's the worst possible thing. It's better to be outrageous. It's better to hang out with the sages, the people open to possibilities, even the psychotics. You never know where you'll find the geniuses of our society. — Deepak Chopra

In Ferdydurke, Gombrowicz got at the fundamental shift that occurred during the twentieth century: until then mankind was divided in two--those who defended the status quo and those who sought to change it. Then the acceleration of History took effect: whereas in the past man had lived continuously in the same setting, in a society that changed only very slowly, now the moment arrived when he suddenly began to feel History moving beneath his feet, like a rolling sidewalk: the status quo was in motion! All at once, being comfortable with the status quo was the same thing as being comfortable with History on the move! Which meant that a person could be both progressive and conformist, conservative and rebel, at the same time! — Milan Kundera

The large majority of teenagers who attend Higgs are soulless, conformist idiots. I have successfully integrated myself into a small group of girls who I consider to be "good people," but sometimes I still feel that I might be the only person with a consciousness, like a video game protagonist, and everyone else are computer-generated extras who have only a select few actions, such as "initiate meaningless conversation" and "hug. — Alice Oseman

We live in a society that penalizes highly creative individuals for their non-conformist autonomy. This makes the teaching of problem solving in design both discouraging and difficult. A ... student (has) massive blocks against new ways of thinking, engendered by some 16 years of mis-education ... — Victor Papanek

How protean are the devices available to human intelligence when it lends itself to the persistence of the conformist error. — Robert M. Lindner

It's strange, isn't it? No matter how quiet and conformist a person's life seems, there's always a time in the past when they reached an impasse. A time when they went a little crazy. — Haruki Murakami

The conformist is not born. He is made. I believe the brainwashing process begins in the schools and colleges. — J. Paul Getty

[F]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey. — Terry Eagleton

Rebelliousness or unconventionality as such do not constitute proof of individualism. Just as individualism does not consist merely of rejecting collectivism, so it does not consist merely of the absence of conformity. A conformist is a man who declares, "It's true because others believe it" - but an individualist is not a man who declares, "It's true because I believe it." An individualist declares, "I believe it because I see in reason that it's true. — Ayn Rand

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist. — Ayn Rand

For us it's not easy to be conformist, I cannot stand to be conformist, I don't accept what it is, I like to say no. If I see an injustice I scream. — Elie Wiesel

Society demands conformity at the expense of individual liberty. Let us be for once a non conformist to be fully alive. — Wayne W. Dyer

the so-called free world was a dictatorship that used media and conformist conditioning to enforce its dominion. — John Shirley

The first step in freeing yourself from social restrictions is the realization that there is no such thing as a safe code of conduct - one that would earn everyone's approval. Your actions can always be condemned by someone - for being too bold or too apathetic, for being too conformist or too nonconformist, for being too liberal or too conservative. So it's necessary to decide whose approval is important to you. — Harry Browne

The more defensive a society, the more conformist. — Ursula K. Le Guin

In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion. — Jane Smiley

Here, by the grace of God and an inside straight, we have a personality untouched by the psychotic taboos of our tribe - and you want to turn him into a carbon copy of every fourth-rate conformist in this frightened land! Why don't you go whole hog? Get him a brief case and make him carry it wherever he goes - make him feel shame if he doesn't have it. — Robert A. Heinlein

all reasonable men adapt themselves to the world. Only a few unreasonable ones persist in trying to adapt the world to themselves. All progress in the world depends on these unreasonable men and their innovative and often non-conformist actions. — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain. — Colin Wilson

I like documenting people who can break away from the conformist boring world we are stuck in and either live their life in a much more far out way or create art that critiques it well. — Yony Leyser

A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows that from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas of freedom. A free society fertilizes the soil in which non-conformity and dissent and individualism can grow. — Henry Steele Commager

Mom and Dad liked to make a big point about never surrendering to fear or to prejudice or to the narrow-minded conformist sticks-in-the-mud who tried to tell everyone else what was proper. — Jeannette Walls

He who would be a man must therefore be a non-conformist. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are so conformist; nobody is thinking. We are all sucking up stuff; we have been trained to be consumers, and we are all consuming far too much. — Vivienne Westwood

The problem with always being a conformist is that when you try to change the system from within, it's not you who changes the system; it's the system that will eventually change you. — Immortal Technique

Ice dance should not be seen as a rigid conformist form of figure skating. There is a great deal of freedom and originality to be had. — Robin Cousins

In almost any society I think, the quality of the nonconformists is likely to be just as good as and no better than that of the conformists. — Margaret Mead