Conformity & Nonconformity Quotes

Why do you have to a nonconformist like everybody else?

James Thurber

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?

Friedrich von Schiller

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.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Take the tone of the company you are in.

Lord Chesterfield

We are half ruined by conformity, but we should be wholly ruined without it.

Charles Dudley Warner

I think the reward for conformity is everyone likes you but yourself.

Rita Mae Brown

The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.

James Baldwin

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.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Conformity, humility, acceptance... with these coins we are to pay our fares to paradise.

Robert Lindner

We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove.

Mark Twain

There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.

Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Cham

Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.

Mignon McLaughlin

Fear God, and offend not the Prince nor his laws, and keep thyself out of the magistrate's claws.

Thomas Tusser

In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from.

Peter Ustinov

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

Friedrich Nietzsche