Nonconformity Quotes - Page 3

• 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

  Funny, Hater, Witty

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• We all live in the protection of certain cowardices which we call our principles.

  Mark Twain

  Individuality, Principles, Protection

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.375, Courier Corporation

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• Singularity in the right hath ruined many; happy those who are convinced of the general opinion.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Opinion, Conformity, Ruined

  Benjamin Franklin (2004). “Poor Richard's Almanack”, p.278, Barnes & Noble Publishing

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• Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity, and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Fashion, People, Individuality

  George Bernard Shaw (1993). “The Complete Prefaces: 1914-1929”, Viking Adult

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

  Charles Dudley Warner

  Being Different, Half, Conformity

  Charles Dudley Warner (1870). “My Summer in a Garden”, p.172

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• The eager and often inconsiderate appeals of reformers and revolutionists are indispensable to counterbalance the inertia and fossilism marking so large a part of human institutions.

  Walt Whitman

  Individuality, Conformity, Institutions

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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.

  Mary McCarthy

  Children, Past, Reality

  Mary McCarthy (2011). “Memories Of A Catholic Girlhood”, p.16, Random House

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• Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Fashion, Teenage, Laughing

  1854 Walden, or Life in the Woods,'Economy'.

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• Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Inspirational, Change, Attitude

  "Everybody's political what's what?" by George Bernard Shaw, Chapter XXXVII, (p. 330), 1944.

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• Take the tone of the company you are in...

  Lord Chesterfield

  Advice, Tone, Conformity

  "Manners and speech or maxims extracted from Lord Chesterfield's letters to his son". Book by Lord Chesterfield, 1884.

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• In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

  Bertrand Russell

  Leadership, Thank You, Thankful

  "Bertrand Russell's Greatest Paradox was His Faith" by Dan Delzell, www.christianpost.com. November 4, 2011.

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• That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.

  John Stuart Mill

  Success, Time, Work

  John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, John Troyer (2003). “The Classical Utilitarians: Bentham and Mill”, p.202, Hackett Publishing

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• The individual has always to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Being Yourself, Lonely, Loneliness

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• The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Life, Motivational, Jobs

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• Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

  Mark Twain

  Change, Loyalty, Courage

  Speech, Hartford, Conn., 1884

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• At this time is freedom anything but the right to live as we wish? Nothing else.

  Epictetus

  Freedom, Philosophical, Wish

  "Epictetus: the Discourses as reported by Arrian, the Manual, and fragments".

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• The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Inspirational, Life, Success

  Walden ch. 1 (1854)

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

  James A. Baldwin

  Conformity, Should, Ideals

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• For all have not the gift of martyrdom.

  John Dryden

  Conformity, Conform, Martyrdom

  John Dryden (1767). “THE MISCELLANEOUS WORKS OF JOHN DRYDEN, Esq; Containing All His ORIGINAL POEMS, TALES, AND TRANSLATIONS, IN FOUR VOLUMES.: VOLUME THE SECOND”, p.31

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• 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."

  Allan Sherman

  Color, Being Different, Might

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• Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

  Aldous Huxley

  Life, Death, Nature

  Do What You Will (1929) "Wordsworth in the Tropics"

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• There's a lot of mediocrity being celebrated, and a lot of wonderful stuff being ignored or discouraged.

  Sean Penn

  Inspiration, Being Ignored, Individuality

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• They taught me different was wrong.

  Ani DiFranco

  Different, Taught, Conformity

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• The opposite of bravery is not cowardice but conformity.

  Robert Anthony

  Courage, Opposites, Bravery

  Robert Anthony (1986). “The Ultimate Secrets of Total Self-Confidence”, p.26, Penguin

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• It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.

  Albert Einstein

  Love, Inspirational, Life

  Albert Einstein (2010). “Ideas And Opinions”, p.33, Broadway Books

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