Non Conformist Quotes

You can't be a non-conformist if you don't wear the proper uniform. ~ Jack L. Chalker

God, as represented by Scripture, by nature is the true non-conformist. He does not need to conform to any truth; He does not need to conform to some moral law. It proclaims that He is the Truth; He defines Morality: the Great I Am, the Beginning and the End who radiates all that is Holy. Therefore, and unless we too were wholly holy and omniscient, we would do well to understand at the very least that even if this God were to wipe away all in existence, then despite my opinion or your opinion, His decision would be objectively good and moral simply because He is the one doing it. ~ Criss Jami

Linde's Danger to Self is a warm, candid and appealing account of being an emergency room psychiatrist. Linde captures the non-conformist, hard-boiled style of the psychiatrists who work in this setting. ~ Tanya Luhrmann

Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else? ~ James Thurber

Society demands conformity at the expense of individual liberty. Let us be for once a non conformist to be fully alive. ~ Wayne W. Dyer

Not so much because many occupations would not permit of a loving attitude, but because the spirit of a production-centered, commodity-greedy society is such that only the non-conformist can defend himself successfully against it. Those who are seriously concerned with love as the only rational answer to the problem of human existence must, then, arrive at the conclusion that important and radical changes in our social structure are necessary, if love is to become a social and not a highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon. ~ Erich Fromm

The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all. ~ Max Beerbohm

... if history is told correctly, no man has caused the worldwide stir that Jesus Christ did 2000 years ago... Jesus was the non-conformist of all time. He took the conventions of religion, tradition, and love and turned them upside down. He faced the political and religious leaders of His day and spoke truths they had never heard before. He walked in our world as the human voice of God. ~ D.C. Talk

Don't you get tired of seeing so many "non-conformists" with the same non-conformist look? ~ Thomas Sowell

( ... the non-conformist, how do you keep from getting scarred?)/i don't! i got a scar here ... and uh i got a scar on my knee ... and uh a few scars on my soul. ~ Marlon Brando

Friends have asked how I came to engender this American antagonism. My prodigious sin was, and still is, being a non-conformist. Although I am not a Communist I refused to fall in line by hating them. Secondly, I was opposed to the Committee on Un-American Activities - a dishonest phrase to begin with, elastic enough to wrap around the throat and strangle the voice of any American citizen whose honest opinion is a minority of one. ~ Charlie Chaplin

The inadequacy of unidimensional plotting along a continuum (in this case the diagonal of a symmetric matrix) inevitably would make "buffer" elements appear non-conformist when in fact they may be part of an interconnected pattern. ~ Jennifer K. McArthur

We live in a society that penalizes highly creative individuals for their non-conformist autonomy. This makes the teaching of problem solving in design both discouraging and difficult. A ... student (has) massive blocks against new ways of thinking, engendered by some 16 years of mis-education ... ~ Victor Papanek

Why is it that all non-conformists look the same? ~ Billy Corgan

Wild birds will kill exotic ones: the budgies and the lovebirds and the yellow canaries
escaped from their cages and hoping to get a taste of the sky
usually end up back on the ground, plucked raw by their more conformist cousins ~ Joanne Harris

In almost any society I think, the quality of the nonconformists is likely to be just as good as and no better than that of the conformists. ~ Margaret Mead

The deviant and the conformist ... are creatures of the same culture, inventions of the same imagination. ~ Kai Theodor Erikson

I think religion is a bunch of hooey, and I think that the holidays are an opportunity for people to get stressed out, getting their rush to shop. It's so conformist. ~ Ricky Martin

Not long ago, a hat was a conformist accessory. Then the 1960s came along, and young people didn't want to wear hats. ~ Philip Treacy

The intellectual world is deeply conformist ... We talk a lot about the crimes of others. When it comes to our own crimes, we are nationalists in the Orwellian sense. ~ Noam Chomsky

The courage to be as oneself within the atmosphere of Enlightenment is the courage to affirm oneself as a bridge from a lower to a higher state of rationality. It is obvious that this kind of courage to be must become conformist the moment its revolutionary attack on that which contradicts reason has ceased, namely in the victorious bourgeoisie. ~ Paul Tillich

And love can exist only in a rebellious heart. With the conformist, love cannot exist, because love is such a dangerous phenomenon. So these two things you have to remember -- that you are the sole authority for your being. Never lean upon crutches, and always decide what you are doing with full awareness.

So be a rebel and be in love: in love with life, in love with yourself, in love with people, in love with all that is available. That is god! A rebellious person necessarily becomes religious, and a loving person cannot miss god, because love is prayer. ~ Rajneesh

School is very conformist, and one of the very first conforming that goes on in preschool and kindergarten is gender. ~ Dan Savage

I'm a Kashmiri ,
I live in a rogue place.
I'm surrounded by conformist ,
boot licking ,
people pleasing "herd"!

People
Safely cocooned in their stereotypical conformist lives,
maintaining status quo ,
they make generic responses
expecting generic answers!

For someone with an alien mentality like 'mine' ,
I am an out cast !
But it's 'them' who are the eerie one ,
like the deadly malignant tumour
feeding on its own people ,
A parasite,
growing inside the system!

Superficial faces ,
powdered with lies and deceit ;
people ,
like controlled robots,
In love with their own ignorance !! ~ BinYamin Gulzar

I wanted to have a reaction from the audience. I wanted to be able to talk to somebody, and not be talking just to myself. That's when I did 'The Conformist,' 'Last Tango in Paris,' etc. And I found it was incredibly rewarding, something new. ~ Bernardo Bertolucci

In Ferdydurke, Gombrowicz got at the fundamental shift that occurred during the twentieth century: until then mankind was divided in two--those who defended the status quo and those who sought to change it. Then the acceleration of History took effect: whereas in the past man had lived continuously in the same setting, in a society that changed only very slowly, now the moment arrived when he suddenly began to feel History moving beneath his feet, like a rolling sidewalk: the status quo was in motion! All at once, being comfortable with the status quo was the same thing as being comfortable with History on the move! Which meant that a person could be both progressive and conformist, conservative and rebel, at the same time! ~ Milan Kundera

America was not built by conformists, but by mutineers. ~ Jim Hightower

Conformists die, but heretics live forever. ~ Elbert Hubbard

I think that certainly the artists of the '40s, '50s and '60s were fighting a very conformist society, which didn't give them enough space to live or create, and they were bucking all kinds of spoken and unspoken rules. ~ Anne Roiphe

How protean are the devices available to human intelligence when it lends itself to the persistence of the conformist error. ~ Robert M. Lindner

Our society needs criminals like Wolfgang Priklopil in order to give a face to the evil that lives within and to split it off from ... It needs the images of cellar dungeons so as not to have to see the many homes in which violence rears its conformist, bourgeois head. Society uses the victims of sensational cases such as mine in order to divest itself of the responsibility for the many nameless victims of daily crimes, victims nobody helps – even when they ask for help. ~ Natascha Kampusch

Conformist intellectuals, the ones who support official aims and ignore or rationalize official crimes, are honored and privileged in their own societies, while the value-oriented are punished in one way or another. The ~ Noam Chomsky

It's easier to be conformist naturally; it's easier except for those who don't like conformism. ~ Elie Wiesel

Mastery is not a function of genius or talent. It is a function of time and intense focus applied to a particular field of knowledge. But there is another element, an X factor that Masters inevitably possess, that seems mystical but that is accessible to us all. Whatever field of activity we are involved in, there is generally an accepted path to the top. It is a path that others followed, and because we are conformist creatures, most of us opt for this conventional route. But Masters have a strong inner guiding system and a high level of self-awareness. What has suited others in the past does not suit them, and they know that trying to fit into a conventional mold would only lead to a dampening of spirit, the reality they seek eluding them.

And so inevitably, these Masters, as they progress on their career paths, make a choice at a key moment in their lives: they decide to forge their own route, one that others will see as unconventional, but that suits their own spirit and rhythms and leads them closer to discovering the hidden truths of their objects of study. This key choice takes self-confidence and self-awarenes–the X factor that is necessary for attaining mastery... ~ Robert Greene

Even if we're not doing anything wrong, there are certain things we want to do that we don't think can withstand the scrutinizing eye of other people. And those are often the most important things that we do. The things we do when other people are watching are things that are conformist, obedient, normal, and unnotable. ~ Glenn Greenwald

Our legal system, including the police, is anti-Dalit and anti-poor. The death penalty laws' wrathful majesty, in blood-shot equality, deals the fatal blow on the poor not the rich, the pariah not the brahmin, the black not the white, the underdog not the top dog, the dissenter not the conformist ... The law barks at all but bites only the poor, the powerless, the illiterate, the ignorant. ~ V. R. Krishna Iyer

Here, by the grace of God and an inside straight, we have a personality untouched by the psychotic taboos of our tribe - and you want to turn him into a carbon copy of every fourth-rate conformist in this frightened land! Why don't you go whole hog? Get him a brief case and make him carry it wherever he goes - make him feel shame if he doesn't have it. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

the so-called free world was a dictatorship that used media and conformist conditioning to enforce its dominion. ~ John Shirley

It's just, people throwing around fashionable lingo think they're so hip and imaginative. But you can't be hip and imaginative. You can be unhip and imaginative, or hip and conformist. ~ Lionel Shriver

Society's only real 'progressives' are the deviants and mutants. Look at evolution - fish who didn't deviate never became amphibians; frogs who didn't mutate never became reptiles; conformist snakes never became mammals , etc. Normal Humans will remain humans, and they'll be subjugated by the digital monsters of the next few millenia. ~ Jim Goad

A fanatical psychosis of contempt possessed us and we succumbed to it gladly. In it I recognized the real thing, my genuine feeling about these festivals by international troupes of castrated morons and rarified conformist cows. ~ Ludvík Vaculík

The pressure of an all-powerful totalitarian state creates an emotional tension in its citizens that determines their acts. When people are divided into "loyalists" and "criminals" a premium is placed on every type of conformist, coward, and hireling; whereas among the "criminals" one finds a singularly high percentage of people who are di­rect, sincere, and true to themselves. From the social point of view these persons would constitute the best guarantee that the future development of the social organism would be toward good. From the Christian point of view they have no other sin on their con­science save their contempt for Caesar, or their in­ correct evaluation of his might. ~ Czesław Miłosz

A time comes when silence is betrayal. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought, within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

The conformist understands that the reason of his desperate look for conformism is that he realises he is different and that he never accepted his difference. ~ Bernardo Bertolucci

Rebelliousness or unconventionality as such do not constitute proof of individualism. Just as individualism does not consist merely of rejecting collectivism, so it does not consist merely of the absence of conformity. A conformist is a man who declares, "It's true because others believe it" - but an individualist is not a man who declares, "It's true because I believe it." An individualist declares, "I believe it because I see in reason that it's true. ~ Ayn Rand