#conformity

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

I'd trapped myself in a script.... But to be scripted at all is to be prepackaged, programmed, pinned to a page. Only the unwritten can truly live a life. So who I was, what I was, had to be unwritten. ↗

— David James Duncan

#freedom #independence #individuality #freedom

But I still wonder how it was possible, in those graceless years of transition, long ago, that men did not see whither they were going, and went on, in blindness and cowardice ↗

— Ayn Rand

#groupthink #masses #men

The simplistic way of not conforming is to see what is in style in our culture and then do the opposite. If short hair is in vogue, the nonconformist wears long hair. If going to the movies is popular, then Christians avoid movies as “worldly.” The extreme case of this may be seen in groups that refuse to wear buttons or use electricity because such things, too, are worldly. A superficial style of nonconformity is the classical pharisaical trap. The kingdom of God is not about buttons, movies, or dancing. The concern of God is not focused on what we eat or what we drink. The call of nonconformity is a call to a deeper level of righteousness, that goes beyond externals. When piety is defined exclusively in terms of externals, the whole point of the apostle’s teaching has been lost. Somehow we have failed to hear Jesus’ words that it is not what goes into a person’s mouth that deflies a person, but what comes out of that mouth. We still want to make the kingdom a matter of eating and drinking. ↗

— R.C. Sproul

#nonconformity #movies

The societies kids naturally form are tribal. Gangs, clubs, packs. But we're herded into schools and terrified into behaving. Taught how we're supposed to pretend to be, taught to parrot all kinds of nonsense at the flick of a switch, taught to keep our heads down and our elbows in and shut off our minds and shut off our sex. We learn we can't even piss when we have to. That's how we learn to be plastic and dumb. ↗

— Marge Piercy

#piercy #rebellion #nature

At the beginning of human history, man lost some of the basic animal instincts in which an animal's behavior is embedded and by which it is secured. Such security, like paradise, is closed to man forever; man has to make choices. In addition to this, however, man has suffered another loss in his more recent development inasmuch as the traditions which buttressed his behavior are now rapidly diminishing. No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people tell him to do (totalitarianism). ↗

— Viktor E. Frankl

#conformity

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth. ↗

— John F. Kennedy

#enemy #freedom #growth #jailer

We cannot expect that all nations will adopt like systems, for conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth. ↗

— John F. Kennedy

#all nations #cannot #conformity #enemy #expect

Or about how when you're a child, to stop you from following the crowd you're assaulted with the line "If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?" but when you're an adult and to be different is suddenly a crime, people seem to be saying, "Hey. Everyone else is jumping off a bridge. Why aren't you? ↗

— Steve Toltz

#crime