Quotes About Conformity

Conformity is that jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.  ~ John F. Kennedy


To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.  ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson


Do not follow where the path may lead.  Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.  ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson


At least once in your lifetime take a risk for a principle you believe in, even if it brings you up against your bosses.  ~ Daniel Schorr


If you stand up and be counted, from time to time you may get yourself knocked down. But remember this: A man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good.  ~ Thomas J. Watson Jr.


On matters of style, swim with the current, on matters of principle, stand like a rock.  ~ Thomas Jefferson


I think the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself.  ~ Rita Mae Brown


Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities.  The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary.  ~ Albert Einstein


We are all born originals - why is it so many of us die copies?  ~ Edward Young


If everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking.  ~ Benjamin Franklin


Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.  ~ Vincent Van Gogh


It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.  ~ Herman Melville


If critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered "dangerous" but set in place in their compartmental understandings.  ~ Jack Kerouac


You have enemies?  Good.  That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.  ~ Winston Churchill


The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.  ~ John Kenneth Galbraith


Why do you have to be a non-conformist like everybody else?  ~ Stan Hunt


To be one's self, and unafraid whether right or wrong, is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity.  ~ Irving Wallace


He who lives among dogs must learn to pant.  ~ Fred Hoyle


The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.  ~ Quentin Crisp


I'm not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I've always been a freak. So I've been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I'm one of those people.  ~ John Lennon


Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.  ~ Mark Twain


If everyone is thinking alike then somebody isn't thinking.  ~ George S. Patton


As to conforming outwardly and living your own life inwardly, I do not think much of that.  ~ Henry David Thoreau


Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much.  ~ Walter Lippmann


I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.  ~ Marcel Duchamp


Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.  ~ Henry David Thoreau


We cannot improve the world if we are conformed to the world.  ~ Neal A. Maxwell


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


Labels are for filing.  Labels are for clothing.  Labels are not for people.  ~ Martina Navratilova

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul.  ~ Virginia Woolf