Quotes & Sayings About Non Conformity

I can't change the world, I can only change how I choose to live in it. — Charlotte Eriksson

Genius is non-conformity. — Vladimir Nabokov

I mistook non-conformity for freedom and in so doing found myself anything but free. For it is in conformity to one's true nature that one is most becoming, in both senses of the word: well-fitted and beautiful. — Karen Swallow Prior

You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant. — Norman Mailer

My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. "Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?" they asked me the other day.
I told them this story:
In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me ... I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you ... you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day. — Tom Waits

If, living in the world, you refuse to be a part of it, you will help other out of this chaos - not in the future, not tomorrow, but now. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

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

Their common denominator of humanism could not be reconciled with the Biblical view of man's depravity after the Fall and his need of salvation. Too late, many ministers began to see that hippie non-conformity with, and rejection of, the world was hardly the same as that high spiritual quest advocated by the Apostle Paul. — Bob Larson

If a minority culture doesn't accept you as much as majority culture, think about following a path of non-conformity — Paul Isaacs

No one knows, at sight a masterpiece.
And give up verse, my boy,
There's nothing in it.
Likewise a friend of Bloughram's once advised me:
Don't kick against the pricks,
Accept opinion. The Nineties tried your game
And died, there's nothing in it. — Ezra Pound

When I am told I am too old to do something, I try to do it right away. — Pablo Picasso

All art is based on non-conformity. — Ben Shahn

Once, I ordered two thousand lady bugs from the local garden center and set them loose in the atrium. I sprinkled marigold seeds in the ficus planters and put gold fish in the lobby fountain. These are things I did with no consequences, no repercussions. My nineteen detentions were for smart answers and missed homework. There is no equivalent punishment for making the world a stranger place. — Brenna Yovanoff

Each one of us, as long as life stirs is us, may play a part in extricating ourselves from the power system by asserting our primacy as people in quiet acts of mental or physical withdrawal-in gestures of non-conformity, in abstentions, restrictions, inhibitions, which will liberate us from the domination of the pentagon of power. — Lewis Mumford

ROBERT ROTH: Going against the tide, no matter how gracefully, will beat you up after a while - all artists know this. — Greg Prato

One of the saddest things about conformity is the ghastly sort of non-conformity it breeds; the noisy protesting, the aggressive rebelliousness, the rigid counter-fetishism. — Louis Kronenberger

To creative people, the compendium of the white man's dialect are unfashionable, because their creations are more than what the tongue could say. — Michael Bassey Johnson

If you're wonderful in any way somebody will fuck with you. Just like if you're horrible in any way they're gonna fuck with you. The world is for the average and the common. Those are the people who never hurt - they just fall asleep. The rest of us, we're The Walking Wounded. — Kim Fowley

Non-conformity is the only real passion worth being ruled by. — Julian Assange

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important. — Luis Bunuel

That community is already in the process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where non-conformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection; where denunciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence; where orthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent; where faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win or lose. — Learned Hand

She was an extraordinary person too! Would you believe it, she cut her hair short, and used to go about in men's boots in bad weather — Henrik Ibsen

I am neither for conformity nor non-conformity. I am for individuality. If one's individuality is in effect non-conformity, then so be it. But basically, one's individuality consists of conformity
to one's self. — Paul Krassner

They strike one, above all, as giving no account of themselves in any terms already consecrated by human use; to this inarticulate state they probably form, collectively, the most unprecedented of monuments; abysmal the mystery of what they think, what they feel, what they want, what they suppose themselves to be saying. — Henry James

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

But human beings are not machines, and however powerful the pressure to conform, they sometimes are so moved by what they see as injustice that they dare to declare their independence. In that historical possibility lies hope. — Howard Zinn

Protestantism came and gave a great blow to the religious and ritualistic rhythm of the year, in human life. Non-conformity almostfinished the deed ... Mankind has got to get back to the rhythm of the cosmos, and the permanence of marriage. — D.H. Lawrence

By acquiescing in an act that causes such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished? — Rachel Carson

Each one of us has to be what he or she is. — Kurt Vonnegut

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

We come from the mentality, that rarely sees the horror in symmetry or the beauty in non-conformity — Shane Koyczan

Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively. — Dalai Lama XIV

We must beware of yielding to the pressure of a spirit of cowardly conformity which proclaims itself everybody's friend in the hope that everybody will obligingly return the compliment. — Antonin Sertillanges

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

In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time. — John Stuart Mill