#conform

The opposite for courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow. ↗

— Jim Hightower

#conformity #cowardice #dead #even #fish

You measure a democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists. ↗

— Abbie Hoffman

#conformists #democracy #dissidents #freedom #gives

If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. ↗

— H. P. Lovecraft

#backgrounds #bludgeon #conformity #consequences #followers

You either go along with the system - conform to what is expected to be a hit - or you have very tough going. ↗

— Budd Schulberg

#conform #either #expected #go #going

A "Normal" person is the sort of person that might be designed by a committee. You know, "Each person puts in a pretty color and it comes out gray. ↗

— Alan Sherman

#humor #design

Logic is something the mind has created to conceal its timidity, a hocus-pocus designed to give formal validity to conclusions we are willing to accept if everybody else in our set will too. ↗

— Carl L. Becker

#logic #society #design

But the death of spirit goes by another name. It is usually called the birth of reason. The dreams of reason are, at this late date, everywhere to be seen, much like headstones in a cemetery. The inertia of a standard which prunes every tree to the dimensions of a utility pole will, with the same determination, core the heart out of the human personality. This fermenting mind, intoxicated by its heady sobriety, methodically slits its own throat, all the while mistaking the elongating wound for a smile. When the spirit is free, according to Nietzsche, the head will be the bowels of the heart. In these top heavy days that have turned life topsy-turvy the head has little appetite for freedom. Instead it has developed a taste for coprophagy. ↗

— Ed Lawrence

#freedom #reason #dating

I always have a problem liking things I'm told I should like. ↗

— Karl Pilkington

#life #liking #relatable #telling #life

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

#life #nonconformity #life

It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#men