Quotes & Sayings About Nonconformity

It then becomes necessary to stop short and make a choice: Either/Or. Either one drifts with their absurd system of ideas, believing that this is the human community. Or one dissents totally from their system of ideas and stands as a lonely human being. (But luckily one notices that the others are in the same crisis and making the same choices.) — Paul Goodman

After all, we scientific workers ... like women, are the victims of fashion: at one time we wear dissociated ions, at another electrons; and we are always loth to don rational clothing; some fixed belief we must have manufactured for us: we are high or low church, of this or that degree of nonconformity, according to the school in which we are brought up-but the agnostic is always rare of us and of late years the critic has been taboo. — Henry Edward Armstrong

These eight independent satellite states of the psychopathic personality
Machiavellian Egocentricity, Impulsive Nonconformity, Blame Externalization, Carefree Nonplanfulness, Fearlessness, Social Potency, Stress Immunity, and Coldheartedness. — Kevin Dutton

I think of my father growing up in South Jersey, the son of second-generation German immigrant glassblowers. The opportunities for him of feeling that aspiration, that yearning, get out of the small town, connect to a larger world, get yourself to New York, wanting to play the piano at every opportunity, bonding with people who were on a similar path, ending up in Provincetown, which was kind of nexus for nonconformity, and artistic dropout reality. — Anne Waldman

I was aware that he was laughing at me, but I told myself I didn't care what other people thought and would dress how I liked. Of course, like many self-consciously wacky people, I was in fact paralyzed by fear of the opinions of others and made the effort to appear as the maddest of the mad headbangers just in case anyone had the slightest lingering doubt as to the depth of my devotion. In fact, I think my disguise felt so fragile I couldn't allow it a single crack. If I did it might fall to bits and leave the real me shrivelling under the evaluating gaze of my peer group. — Mark Barrowcliffe

It is probable that democracy owes more to nonconformity than to any other single movement. — R. H. Tawney

My brand of Satanism is the ultimate conscious alternative to herd mentality and institutionalized thought. It is a studied and contrived set of principles and exercises designed to liberate individuals from a contagion of mindlessness that destroys innovation. I have termed my thought "Satanism" because it is most stimulating under that name. Self-discipline and motivation are effected more easily under stimulating conditions. Satanism means "the opposition" and epitomizes all symbols of nonconformity. Satanism calls forth the strong ability to turn a liability into an advantage, to turn alienation into exclusivity. In other words, the reason it's called Satanism is because it's fun, it's accurate, and it's productive. — Anonymous

But let it not be said that we did nothing. Let not those who love the power of the welfare/warfare state label the dissenters of authoritarianism as unpatriotic or uncaring. Patriotism is more closely linked to dissent than it is to conformity and a blind desire for safety and security. Understanding the magnificent rewards of a free society makes us unbashful in its promotion, fully realizing that maximum wealth is created and the greatest chance for peace comes from a society respectful of individual liberty. — Ron Paul

Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity. — Eric Hoffer

Freedom means nothing unless it means the freedom to be different — Marty Rubin

Cause and effect is the basis of my education, leading me to an essence far more profound than any rule of societal conditioning. — Ka Chinery

We are fighting now to save that endangered species-the individual. — Marty Rubin

Any fool can do something cool and look cool, but it takes skill to make something uncool cool again. — Criss Jami

How come when girls play with gender it's a sign of strength and when boys play with gender it's a sign of weakness? — Lori Duron

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

I dare say a good many ... would have kept quiet and thought about keeping on the right side of the Chief, but I'm afraid I'm not much good at that. — Richard Adams

Seeds have the power to preserve species, to enhance cultural as well as genetic diversity, to counter economic monopoly and to check the advance of conformity on all its many fronts. — Michael Pollan

-I have to admit that ever since I started to rip-up the lawns of rich people I have felt a lot calmer! — Andrew James Pritchard

For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. The by-standers look askance on him in the public street or in the friend's parlour. If this aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance like his own, he might well go home with a sad countenance; but the sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A hint of nonconformity was all he would risk. — William Landay

I don't belong to the masses, I've been against the masses all my life, and I'm not in favour of dogs. — Thomas Bernhard

Most people want so desperately to be an individual yet are so easily shaped by the media. — Criss Jami

Madness is only a variety of mental nonconformity and we are all individualists here. — Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Some people respect some people only because some people respect them. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Creation from chaos is natural. We've come to a place where we've realized that we have this actual physical need to create things. We've discovered that we hate people en masse, we're sick of homogenized culture, and these realizations have left holes in our hearts. We create to fill those holes, to be able to sleep at night knowing we've done something, even a small something, to confront the manufactured culture that is currently being churned out. — Renee Rigdon

A writer or painter cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of nonconformity alive. — Luis Bunuel

What made Einstein special was his impertinence, his nonconformity, and his distaste for dogma. Einstein's genius reminds us that a society's competitive advantage comes not from teaching the multiplication or periodic tables but from nurturing rebels. Grinds have their place, but unruly geeks change the world. (Walter Issacson, Wired) — Alexandra Robbins

Despite the enormous pressures in Hollywood, Kim Kardashian never set out to fit in, and it's this exact nonconformity that drives our global obsession with her. — Jeetendr Sehdev

In his mother's honor, vowing not to commit the "fashionable stupidity" of ignoring things he didn't understand, Max performed a brave act of nonconformity by accepting the possibility that his dreams might be exactly what they seemed: real. — Sol Luckman

I am not a number; I am a free man. — Patrick McGoohan

Some say that you should turn your face from the light of the moon. They say it makes you mad.
I turn my face towards it and I laugh.
Make me mad, I whisper. Go on, make Mina mad.
I laugh again.
Some people think that she's already mad, I think. — David Almond

The job is what you do when you are told what to do. The job is showing up at the factory, following instructions, meeting spec, and being managed.
Someone can always do your job a little better or faster or cheaper than you can.
The job might be difficult, it might require skill, but it's a job.
Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people.
I call the process of doing your art 'the work.' It's possible to have a job and do the work, too. In fact, that's how you become a linchpin.
The job is not the work. — Seth Godin

Her choice to be, not only a poet but a woman who explored her own mind, without any of the guidelines of orthodoxy. To say "yes" to her powers was not simply a major act of nonconformity in the nineteenth century; even in our own time it has been assumed that Emily Dickinson, not patriarchal society, was "the problem." The ore we come to recognise the unwritten and written laws and taboos underpining patriarchy, the less problematical, surely, will seem the methods she chose. — Adrienne Rich

At one time or another most of us at the Creek have been suspected of a degree of madness. Madness is only a variety of mental nonconformity ... — Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist, it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity. — Bill Vaughan

You know, Qhuinn's an interesting character." Saxton reached out with an elegant hand and picked up his port. "He's one of my favorite cousins, actually. His nonconformity is admirable and he's survived things that would crush a lesser male. Don't know that being in love with him would be easy, however."
Blay didn't go near that one. "So do you come here often?"
Saxton laughed, his pale eyes glinting, "Not for discussion, huh. — J.R. Ward

But Jakob had the gift of confession, could talk about how he wanted to touch her and be with her, with all the daring and athletic skill he brought to riding a unicycle or walking on a tightrope. He was small and compact and muscular, and also intellectually muscular, mentally something of an acrobat. Sometimes she felt that those intellectual acrobatics were a bit tiring; at those times she felt less as if they were feeling everything together, more as if she were simply his audience, someone to applaud his latest leap through the burning hoop of existentialism and his backflip onto the trampoline of nonconformity. But — Joe Hill

Nonconformity is an empty goal, and rebellion against prevailing opinion merely because it is prevailing should no more be praised than acquiescence to it. Indeed, it is often a mask for cowardice, and few are more pathetic than those who flaunt outer differences to expiate their inner surrender. — William H. Whyte

This was the price for the the strange life she had chosen, but she had gone into it with eyes open, and there was no profit in regret. — Donna Woolfolk Cross

I took the other road, all right, but only because it was the easy road for me, the way I wanted to go. If I've encountered some unnecessary resistance that's because most of the traffic is going the other way. — Edward Abbey

Most schooling is training for stupidity and conformity, and that's institutional, but occasionally you get a spark, somebody'll challenge your mind, make you think and so on, and that has a tremendous effect you just reach all sorts of people. Of course if you do it you may very have problems, you have to tread the narrow line. There are plenty of people who don't want students to think, they're afraid of the crisis of democracy. If people start thinking you get all these problems that I quoted before. They won't have enough humility to submit to a civil rule or they'll start trying to press their demands in the political arena and have ideas of their own, instead of beleiving what they're told. And privelage and power typically doesn't want that and so they react and the high school teacher that tries to get students to think may find oppression, firing and so on. — Noam Chomsky

She was a surprise, and let's face it, few people are. — Donna Lynn Hope

Democracy is nonconformity; it is mutual loyalty, even when we have to attack one another's ideas - ideas, which, because they are always human, are always incomplete. — Joost A.M. Meerloo

Don't get caught up in fashion games. These kids probably think we're old, nark conformists or something, but really, they're just conforming in their own ways. They're conforming to nonconformity. — Richelle Mead

Your path is yours alone. And if it's the path less traveled, that's absolutely fine. The world doesn't need more conformists. The world needs more people who create and question and search. — Laird Hamilton

If you don't give yourself permission to create a new world, chances are nobody else will. — James Altucher

At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet. — Seth Godin

But I think the Court again heard clearly the simple theme that ennobles our Constitution: that no one shall be made to feel uncomfortable or unsafe because of nonconformity. — E.B. White

So distracting, so complete is she that she is gone before many realize that she had no escort, she was along, a parade of one. — Jerry Spinelli

The implication of nonconformity is intolerable to Communists. — Doan Van Toai

Nonconformity is an affront to those in the mainstream. — David Miller

Authority should be questioned, hierarchies should be circumvented, nonconformity should be admired, and creativity should be nurtured. — Walter Isaacson

The Australians, it seems to me, thrive on their remoteness from the world and see it as a way of keeping up a code of "No worries, mate," while peddling their oddities to visitors: nonconformity is at once a fact of life for many, and a selling point. — Pico Iyer

Giving style to one's character - a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own natures and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The human condition ... is defined by the aspiration to always supersede oneself, which in turn requires nonconformity. — Pablo Antonio Cuadra

They call it "young music"; I see, however, that the record industry makes millions by the carload for shrewd older people! They invoke the name of spontaneity, nonconformity and originality; actually, canny "clothing industrialists" manipulate the field, undisturbed sovereigns! They call themselves revolutionaries, but the overscrupulous attentions devoted to their hair and their dress risk creating merely effeminates. — Pope John Paul I

Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them. — Boris Pasternak

The believer's cross is no longer any and every kind of suffering, sickness, or tension, the bearing of which is demanded. The believer's cross must be, like his Lord's, the price of his social nonconformity. It is not, like sickness or catastrophe, an inexplicable, unpredictable suffering; it is the end of the path freely chosen after counting the cost. It is not, like Luther's or Thomas Muntzer's or Zinzendorf's or Kierkegaard's cross, an inward wrestling of the sensitive soul with self and sin; it is the social reality of representing in an unwilling world the Order to come. — John Howard Yoder

The system loves resistance. Resistance is often creative and it feeds on creativity until the subversive becomes just another pre-packaged lifestyle on special offer. So Cease to Resist. Relax and enjoy the PandaemonAeon. Believe everything and anything. Seek not proof, but take pleasure in your choice of belief. Wipe that superior sneer of your face and try smiling (if only inwardly) at the people/institutions/beliefs that you've waged your personal war against. Wouldn't it be more fun if you didn't run around quite so hard trying to be an individual, or fighting to prove or uphold your chosen belief-system? — Phil Hine

It's in the morning, for most of us. It's that time, those few seconds when we're coming out of sleep but we're not really awake yet. For those few seconds we're something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be. And then ... and then
ah
we open our eyes and the day is before us and ... we become ourselves. — Jerry Spinelli

Never subject to the rules, believing that the correct judgement and healthy nature keep her in the honesty she lived in. — Emile Zola

If it hasn't already done so, the church ... must recognize that it lives in a pagan society; it must seek for values and norms not shared by society. In short, it will either recover the Christian doctrine of nonconformity or cease to have any authentic Christian voice. — Doris Janzen Longacre

To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics. — Mary McCarthy

185. It Is Getting So Dark
I am the sort of person who approves of what others abhor and detests the things they like. — Sei Shonagon

Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals. — Aldo Leopold

Every great historic change has been based on nonconformity, has been bought either with the blood or with the reputation of nonconformists. — Ben Shahn

There was alienation in the standing consciousness that his squareness would not fit the round hole that had been prepared for him. — Thomas Hardy

He likes driving very fast on the wrong side of the road," said Sarah. "Which I can completely understand. — Hilary McKay

All art is based on nonconformity ... Without nonconformity we would have had no Bill of Rights or Magna Carta, no public education system, no nation upon this continent, no continent, no science at all, no philosophy, and considerably fewer religions. — Ben Shahn

If unconventional ideas = sperm, then public opinion = abortion. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

For nonconformity the world will whip you with its displeasure. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

I am not made like any of those I have seen. I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

A sure way of retaining the grace of heaven is to disregard outward appearances, and diligently to cultivate such things as foster amendment of life and fervour of soul, rather than to cultivate those qualities that seem most popular. — Thomas A Kempis

Freedom began on the day the first sheep wandered away from the herd. — Marty Rubin

Snark functions as a device to punish human spontaneity, eccentricity, nonconformity, and simple error. Everyone is being snarked into line, — Ryan Holiday

Nonconformity in dating is all about being authentic and true to yourself. — Amy Leigh Mercree

Anyone can be anything, irrespective of their stars;
Anyone can be anything, irrespective of their sex (or orientation, if you may);
Anyone can be anything, irrespective of their age;
Anyone can be anything, irrespective of their size;
Anyone can be anything, irrespective of their religion (or choice of nonconformity);
Anyone can be anything, irrespective of their colour (or absence thereof);
Anyone can be anything, irrespective of any previous defining moments;
Anyone can be anything, irrespective of anything;
Even if, just, for a while.
It all comes from a place of choice, will, and determination.
And if you, probably, wonder if I blunder when I juggle such trivial and contrasting ideologies,
That's simply because I can be just about anything.
CHECK: Anyone can be anything, but not everything is expedient for everyone. — Ufuoma Apoki

Nonconformity is nothing but self-interest in disguise. — Lisa Kleypas

He'd made a name for himself out there in the world beyond not just in spite of the distinctly unfashionable persona he presented, but, perhaps, BECAUSE of it. — Chris Matthews