Quotes · Skopia

13 quotes

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Topic·Conformity✕clear

Essay · Philosophical literature · Political literature

A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another.

John Stuart Mill

On Liberty · 1859

★ 1.3

Philosophical literature

One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

Bertrand Russell

1930

★ 1.9

Sociology · Economic literature

These are the days when men of all social disciplines and all political faiths seek the comfortable and the accepted; when the man of controversy is looked upon as a disturbing influence; when originality is taken to be a mark of instability; and when, in minor modification of the scriptural parable, the bland lead the bland.

John Kenneth Galbraith

The Affluent Society · 1958

★ 1.9

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Essays: First Series (Emerson) · 1841

★ 2.2

Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers.

1927

★ 3.5

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.

1955

★ 3.5

Political literature

You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor.... Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to think other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.

1856

★ 3.5

No one can possibly achieve any real and lasting success or "get rich" in business by being a conformist.

1965

★ 3.5

Novel · Satire

I've never done a single thing I've wanted to in my whole life! I don't know 's I've accomplished anything except just get along.

Babbitt · 1922

★ 3.6

Every society honors its live conformists, and its dead trouble makers.

Mignon McLaughlin

The Neurotic's Notebook · 1963

★ 3.6

To be like everyone else. Isn't that what we all want in the end?

1997

★ 3.6

To do exactly as your neighbors do is the only sensible rule.

1922

★ 3.8

Sociology · Economic literature

It will be convenient to have a name for the ideas which are esteemed at any time for their acceptability, and it should be a term that emphasizes this predictability. I shall refer to these ideas henceforth as the conventional wisdom.

John Kenneth Galbraith

The Affluent Society · 1958

★ 4.4