He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.
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We are citizens of an age, as well as of a State; and if it is held to be unseemly, or even inadmissible, for a man to cut himself off from the customs and manners of the circle in which he lives, why should it be less of a duty, in the choice of his activity, to submit his decision to the needs and the taste of his century?
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It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.
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To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.
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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.
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Fear God, and offend not the Prince nor his laws, and keep thyself out of the magistrate's claws.
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The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
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Take the tone of the company you are in.
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The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.
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Why do you have to a nonconformist like everybody else?
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Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture?
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The opposite of bravery is not cowardice but conformity.
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I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.
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I think the reward for conformity is everyone likes you but yourself.
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Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.
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One lesson we learn early, that in spite of seeming difference, men are all of one pattern. We readily assume this with our mates, and are disappointed and angry if we find that we are premature, and that their watches are slower than ours. In fact, the only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.
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To do exactly as your neighbors do is the only sensible rule.
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We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove.
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For all have not the gift of martyrdom.
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Conform and be dull.
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But you must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know, that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.
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Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity
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In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from.
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Most people can't understand how others can blow their noses differently than they do.
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For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.
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Nonconformists hate other nonconformists who won't conform to their way of nonconformity.
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As to conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I have not a very high opinion of that course.
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Woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.
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Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect.
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Conforming to nonconformity is still conforming.
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