Social Conformity Quotes & Sayings

We're all teased or pressured into conforming to the all-levelling social norms of mediocrity. — H.M. Forester

The common law does not proceed by legislation, or by imposing directives and decrees on a reluctant population. It proceeds by resolving conflicts, and discovering the rules that are implicit in those conflicts and in the behaviour that gives rise to them. Common law is discovered law, and its principles are not imposed from above but extracted from below, by judges whose aim is to do justice in the individual case, rather than to reform the conduct of mankind. Its rights are not stated but implied, and they encapsulate a vision of individual freedom rather than a politics of collective conformity. The rights dreamed up in the European Courts, by judges who do not pay the cost of imposing them, are experiments in social engineering, rather than recognitions of individual sovereignty, and this is in no matter more evident than in those clauses that have imposed the mores of the elite on a reluctant residue of Christian believers, and which are now ubiquitous in our statutory law. — Roger Scruton

Because of social pressure, individualism is rejected by most people in favor of conformity. Thus the individual relies mainly upon the actions of others and neglects the meaning of his own personal life. Hence he sees his own life as meaningless and falls into the "existential vacuum" feeling inner void. Progressive automation causes increasing alcoholism, juvenile delinquency, and suicide. — Viktor E. Frankl

Decadence, decadence, he said to himself. They've lost everything and gained nothing. The French had merely daubed on the finishing touches at the end of a process which had begun five hundred years ago, at least. Their intuitive moral desires coincided with the ideals embodied in the formulas of their religion, yet they could live in accordance neither with those deepest impulses nor with the precepts of the religion, because society came in between with all the pressure of its tradition. No one could afford to be honest or generous or merciful because every one of them distrusted all the others; often they had more confidence in a Christian they were meeting for the first time than in a Moslem they had known for years. — Paul Bowles

What kind of men, then, does our society need? What is the "social character" suited to twentieth century Capitalism? It needs men who co-operate smoothly in large groups; who want to consume more and more, and whose tasks are standardized and can easily be influenced and anticipated. It needs men who feel free and independent, not subject to any authority, or principle, or conscience - yet willing to be commanded, to do what is expected, to fit into the social machine without friction. — Erich Fromm

Mind control is the process by which individual or collective freedom of choice and action is compromised by agents or agencies that modify or distort perception, motivation, affect, cognition and/or behavioral outcomes. It is neither magical nor mystical, but a process that involves a set of basic social psychological principles. Conformity, compliance, persuasion, dissonance, reactance, guilt and fear arousal, modeling and identification are some of the staple social influence ingredients well studied in psychological experiments and field studies. In some combinations, they create a powerful crucible of extreme mental and behavioral manipulation when synthesized with several other real-world factors, such as charismatic, authoritarian leaders, dominant ideologies, social isolation, physical debilitation, induced phobias, and extreme threats or promised rewards that are typically deceptively orchestrated, over an extended time period in settings where they are applied intensively. — Steven Hassan

There's something known as "memory conformity," also known as "social contagion of memory," which refers to a situation where one person's telling of a memory influences another person's account of that same experience. — Rob Roberge

Conformity is the biggest enemy of progress. Break those limiting social rules. — Debasish Mridha

She was the girl growing up that other girls stared at, making her feel different and inadequate.

She was the woman that stared at them, she made them feel inadequate, as she could be her own true self. Free from the social conformity, that imprisons them.

They were now jealous. — Tina J. Richardson

Increasingly, Christian life seems to be nothing more than a particular way of behaving, a code of good conduct. Christianity is increasingly alienated, becoming a social attribute adapted to meet the least worthy of human demands - conformity, sterile conservatism, pusillanimity and timidity; it is adapted to the trivial moralizing which seeks to adorn cowardice and individual security with the funerary decoration of social decorum. — Christos Yannaras

We show wisdom by a decent conformity to social etiquette; it is excess of neatness or display that creates dandyism in men, and coquetry in women. — Robert Adam

Belonging to a group can provide the child with a variety of resources that an individual friendship often cannot
a sense of collective participation, experience with organizational roles, and group support in the enterprise of growing up. Groups also pose for the child some of the most acute problems of social life
of inclusion and exclusion, conformity and independence. — Zick Rubin

All these things were part of the business of dreams. He had learned not to laugh at the advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the bust — Nathanael West

In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary. — Kathleen Norris

These are the sensations and feelings that are gradually blunted by education, staled by custom, rejected in favor of social conformity. — Herbert Read

If the Russians have gone too far in subjecting the child and his peer group to conformity to a single set of values imposed by the adult society, perhaps we have reached the point of diminishing returns in allowing excessive autonomy and in failing to utilize the constructive potential of the peer group in developing social responsibility and consideration for others. — Urie Bronfenbrenner

One must recently have lived on or close to a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It is there that we see how a number of energetic social innovators, plugging their grand designs, succeeded over the years in capturing the liberal intellectual imagination. And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things. Run just about everything. There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals'. — William F. Buckley Jr.

They need a social mechanism to make us require conformity of one other, and the best way to do that is to provide a mechanism to make us punish our own deviants. — Charles Stross

Majority decisions tend to be made without engaging the systematic thought and critical thinking skills of the individuals in the group. Given the force of the group's normative power to shape the opinions of the followers who conform without thinking things through, they are often taken at face value. The persistent minority forces the others to process the relevant information more mindfully. Research shows that the deciscions of a group as a whole are more thoughtful and creative when there is minority dissent than when it is absent. — Philip G. Zimbardo

You cannot grant to universities the intellectual freedom that scholarship requires, it is argued, and also deny the moral freedom that enables students to adapt through their own "experiments in living." Freedom is indivisible, and without it knowledge cannot grow.
The problem with that argument is that, outside the natural sciences and a few solid humanities like philosophy and Egyptology, academic freedom is a thing of the past. What is expected of the student in many courses in the humanities and social sciences is ideological conformity, rather than critical appraisal, and censorship has become accepted as a legitimate part of the academic way of life. — Roger Scruton

What Ruef discovered was a ringing endorsement of the coffeehouse model of social networking: the most creative individuals in Ruef's survey consistently had broad social networks that extended outside their organization and involved people from diverse fields of expertise. Diverse, horizontal social networks, in Ruef's analysis, were three times more innovative than uniform, vertical networks. In groups united by shared values and long-term familiarity, conformity and convention tended to dampen any potential creative sparks. The limited reach of the network meant that interesting concepts from the outside rarely entered the entrepreneur's consciousness. But the entrepreneurs who built bridges outside their "islands," as Ruef called them, were able to borrow or co-opt new ideas from these external environments and put them to use in a new context. — Steven Johnson

The foundation of government is ... laid, not in imaginary rights of men, (which at best is a confusion of judicial with civil principles,) but in political convenience, and in human nature; either as that nature is universal, or as it is modified by local habits and social aptitudes. The foundation of government ... is laid in a provision for our wants, and in a conformity to our duties; it is to purvey for the one; it is to enforce the other. — Edmund Burke

Those societies in which seriousness, tradition, conformity and adherence to long-established - often god-prescribed - ways of doing things are the strictly enforced rule, have always been the majority across time and throughout the world. Such people are not known for their sense of humour and lightness of touch; they rarely break a smile. To them, change is always suspect and usually damnable, and they hardly ever contribute to human development. By contrast, social, artistic and scientific progress as well as technological advance are most evident where the ruling culture and ideology give men and women permission to play, whether with ideas, beliefs, principles or materials. And where playful science changes people's understanding of the way the physical world works, political change, even revolution, is rarely far behind. — Paul Kriwaczek

Diverse, horizontal social networks, in Ruef's analysis, were three times more innovative than uniform, vertical networks. In groups united by shared values and long-term familiarity, conformity and convention tended to dampen any potential creative sparks. — Steven Johnson

THE MYTH OF THE GOOD OL BOY AND THE NICE GAL
The good of boy myth and the nice gal are a kind of social conformity myth. They create a real paradox when put together with the "rugged individual" part of the Success Myth. How can I be a rugged individual, be my own man and conform at the same time? Conforming means "Don't make a wave", "Don't rock the boat". Be a nice gal or a good ol' boy. This means that we have to pretend a lot.
"We are taught to be nice and polite. We are taught that these behaviors (most often lies) are better than telling the truth. Our churches, schools, and politics are rampant with teaching dishonesty (saying things we don't mean and pretending to feel ways we don't feel). We smile when we feel sad; laugh nervously when dealing with grief; laugh at jokes we don't think are funny; tell people things to be polite that we surely don't mean."
- Bradshaw On: The Family — John Bradshaw

The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations, no matter how panoptic they may be: it is neither foreign to them (it can take place only within them) nor in conformity with them (it does not receive its identity from them). It creates shadows and ambiguities within them. It inserts its multitudinous references and citations into them (social models, cultural mores, personal factors). Within them it is itself the effect of successive encounters and occasions that constantly alter it and make it the other's blazon: in other words, it is like a peddler carrying something surprising, transverse or attractive compared with the usual choice. These diverse aspects provide the basis of a rhetoric. They can even be said to define it. — Michel De Certeau

Creativity can replace conformity as the primary mode of social being ... We can cling to that which is passing, or has already passed, or we can remain accessible to-even surrender to-the creative process, without insisting that we know in advance the ultimate outcome for us, our institutions, or our planet. To accept this challenge is to cherish freedom, to embrace life, and to find meaning. — Stephen Nachmanovitch

Conformity is contagious. — Isman H. Suryaman

As a consequence of the enormous social and technological changes of the last few centuries, the world is not working well. We do not live in traditional and static societies. But our government, in resisting change, act as if we did. Unless we destroy ourselves utterly, the future belongs to those societies that, while not ignoring the reptilian and mammalian parts of our being, enable the characteristically human components of our nature to flourish; to those societies that encourage diversity rather than conformity; to those societies willing to invest resources in a variety of social, political, economic and cultural experiments, and prepared to sacrifice short-term advantage for long-term benefit; to those societies that treat new ideas as delicate, fragile and immensely valuable pathways to the future. — Carl Sagan

Everything we did in the 1960s was designed to fission, to weaken faith in and conformity to the 1950s social order. Our precise surgical target was the Judeo-Christian power monolith, which has imposed a guilty, inhibited, grim, anti-body, anti-life repression on Western civilization. — Timothy Leary

Not that I wish by any means to deny, that the mental life of individuals and peoples is also in conformity with law, as is the object of philosophical, philological, historical, moral, and social sciences to establish. — Hermann Von Helmholtz