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To conform is to do what other people do

• Conform: To behave according to the usual standards of behaviour that are expected by a group or society.  Cambridge Dictionary
• Conform: To act in accord with the prevailing standards, attitudes, practices, etc., of society or a group.  Dictionary.com
• Conform: To do what other people do : to behave in a way that is accepted by most people.  Merriam Webster
• Follow your own path,  Be who you are,  Approval seeking

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The pressure to conform is strong …

• For non-conformity the world whips you with its displeasure. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The tendency to conformity in our society is so strong,” Asch wrote, “that reasonably intelligent and well- meaning people are willing to call white black. This is a matter of concern. It raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct. Sir Ken Robinson
• The nail that sticks up will be hammered down. Japanese proverb
• The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened.  But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.  Friedrich Nietzsche
• The terrible tyranny of the majority. Ray Bradbury

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… and most succumb to that pressure

• The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain. Colin Wilson
• Human beings, for all their pretensions, have a remarkable propensity for lending themselves to classification somewhere within neatly labeled categories. Even the outrageous exceptions may be classified as outrageous exceptions!  J. Reichmann
• When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other. Eric Hoffer
• And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual.  Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point.  A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber- stamps.  L. Mencken
• Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.  George Santayana
• Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority. Martin Luther King, Jr.
• As for conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I do not think much of that. Henry David Thoreau
• Pleasure

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From a young age, we are domesticated to all be the same …

• We were born in this society, we grew up in this society. And we learn to be like everyone else, playing nonsense all the time. Miguel Ruiz
• They have turned the wolf into a dog and man himself into the man’s best domesticated animal. Friedrich Nietzsche
• We begin life with the world presenting itself to us as it is. Someone – our parents, teachers, analysts – hypnotizes us to “see” the world and construe it in the “right” way.  These others label the world, attach names and give voices to the beings and events in it, so that thereafter, we cannot read the world in any other language or hear it saying other things to us.  The task is to break the hypnotic spell, so that we become undeaf, unblind and multilingual, thereby letting the world speak to us in new voices and write all its possible meanings in the new book of our existence.  Be careful in your choice of hypnotists. Sidney Jourard
• When I was four years old they tried to test my IQ; they showed me this picture of three ranges and a pear. They asked me which one is different and does not belong; they taught me different was wrong. Ani DiFranco
• When you’re a child, to stop you from following the crowd you’re assaulted with the line, “If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?” But when you’re an adult and to be different is suddenly a crime, people seem to be saying, “Hey.  Everyone else is jumping off a bridge.  Why aren’t you? Steve Toltz

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… and those who are different tend to be criticised and rejected

• One dog barks at something, and a hundred bark at the bark. Chinese Proverb
• Every society honors its live conformists, and its dead troublemakers. Mignon McLaughlin
• How glorious it is – and also how painful – to be an exception. Alfred de Musset
• They will say you are on the wrong road if it is your own. Antonio Porchia
• Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road. Voltaire
• Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. Albert Einstein
• You have enemies?  That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.  Winston Churchill
• When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him. Jonathan Swift
• We are reluctant to live outside tribal rules because we are afraid of getting kicked out of the tribe. Caroline Myss
• We laugh at sheep because sheep just follow the one in front. We humans have out-sheeped the sheep, because at least the sheep need a sheep dog to keep them in line.  Humans keep each other in line.  And they do it by ridiculing or condemning anyone who commits the crime–and that’s what it’s become–of being different. David Icke
• Criticism,  Rejection

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Blind conformity comes at a price

• The reward for conformity was that everyone liked you except yourself. Rita Mae Brown
• A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• If you are always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be. Maya Angelou
• Don’t be normal. Sadly, normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you financed, in order to get to the job that you don’t really like, but that you need, to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it. Marc and Angel Chernoff
• If you stand up and are counted, you may get yourself knocked down. But remember this: A person flattened by an opponent can get up again. A person flattened by conformity stays down for good. Thomas J. Watson, Jr.

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Conformity deadens aliveness

• Our concern must be to live while we’re alive… to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
• Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.  Aldous Huxley
• Only dead fish swim with the stream. Malcolm Muggeridge
• Mental slavery is mental death, and every man who has given up his intellectual freedom is the living coffin of his dead soul. Robert Ingersoll, Individuality
• When some folks agree with my opinions I begin to suspect I’m wrong. Kin Hubbard
• It is very easy to conform to what your society or your parents and teachers tell you. That is a safe and easy way of existing; but that is not living…To live is to find out for yourself what is true… Jiddu Krishnamurti
• Vitality,  Being fully alive

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Conformity is to be grey when you could be embracing colour

• 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 grey.”  Alan Sherman
• Some people like living in black and white worlds. Let them stay there. Appreciate all the colors you see in your world though. Ashly Lorenzana
• Conform and be dull. J. Frank Dobie
• We lie if we say we do not see color and culture and difference. We fool ourselves and cheat ourselves when we say that all of us are the same.  We should not want to be the same as others and we should not want others to be the same as us.  Rather, we ought to glory and shine in all of our differences, flaunting them fabulously for all to see!  It is never a conformity that we need! We need not to conform!  What we need is to burst out into all these beautiful colors! C. JoyBell C.
• Colour

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Conformity is a form of folly

• I believe more follies are committed out of complaisance to the world, than in following our own inclinations. Mary Wortley Montagu
• Public opinion is a compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs. Robert Peel
• Stupidity,  Foolishness

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Conformity is a kind of prison

• Conformity is that jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth. John F. Kennedy
• I feel like a fugitive from the law of averages. William H. Mauldin
• Slavery

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Conformity can be hard work

• My theory is that the hardest work anyone does in life is to appear normal. From the movie Ed TV
• Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal. Albert Camus
• Hard work,  Effort

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Conformity can be deeply limiting

• Isn’t it ironic that in places where individualism and uniqueness are celebrated and considered to be of primary importance, we tend to lead our lives looking for conformity and “fitting in”? I can’t tell you how many times I hear students tell me “I can’t do that because society says I can’t.”  And not once has any of these people been able to tell me just who “society” is, and just who says they can’t.  The truth is, we’re much more afraid of what we think “society” will say than what other people actually will say.  We tend to repress our own wants and needs because we fear that others will see us as selfish or self-absorbed.  But when am I more effective in helping other people?  It’s when my needs are being met, and I’m taking care of myself.  It’s when I listen to my inner self and actually heed its message, taking time for myself or reading what I need to read or not overwhelming myself with obligations.  We’re taught to listen to our parents, to our elders, to our teachers, to our bosses, to our leaders, but we’re rarely taught to listen to ourselves.  It’s time that we learn that lesson ourselves, for it’s a very important one whether it’s taught widely or not. Tom Walsh
• Things that can limit us

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Nonconformity can bring success

• If you really want the key to success, start by doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing. Brad Szollose
• It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. Herman Melville
• Success

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Nonconformity creates progress

• All progress occurs because people dare to be different. Harry Milner
• All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions. Adlai Stevenson
• The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. George Bernard Shaw
• Progress

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Nonconformity awakens possibility and potential

• There are many who are living far below their possibilities because they are continually handing over their individualities to others. Do you want to be a power in the world? Then be yourself. Ralph Waldo Trine
• One of the biggest ways we limit our potential and deny our genius is following The Herd and modeling The Crowd. Robin Sharma
• The worship of convention has never yet led to astonishment and a joyous leap in human potential. Tama J. Kieves
• If you are always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be. Maya Angelou
• Possibility,  Potential

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Nonconformity can even change the world

• People who long to be liked don’t change the world. Robin Sharma
• Geniuses don’t fritter their precious minds on mass trends. They create the trends that alter the masses. Alan Cohen
• If you’re going to make a difference in the world, you’ll soon learn that you can’t follow the herd. Wayne Dyer
• To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
• One who walks in another’s tracks leaves no footprints. Proverb
• Making a difference

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Don’t be a boring slave to the ordinary

• Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it- safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary. Sir Cecil Beaton
• Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring. Marilyn Monroe
• I feel like a fugitive from the law of averages. William H. Mauldin
• Slavery

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Don’t be slave to traditions and customs just for the sake of it

• Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity; and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom. George Bernard Shaw
• Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature. George Bernard Shaw
• Just because something is tradition doesn’t make it right. Anthony J. D’Angelo, The College Blue Book
• Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or that our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than we suspect of what we think. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
• Traditions are group efforts to keep the unexpected from happening. Mignon McLaughlin
• Men will sooner surrender their rights than their customs. Moritz Guedemann
• Custom meets us at the cradle and leaves us only at the tomb. Robert Ingersoll
• Tradition

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Don’t blindly follow fashion

• Fashion is more powerful than any tyrant. Latin Proverb
• You cannot be both fashionable and first-rate. Logan Pearsall Smith
• Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. Henry David Thoreau
• I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions. Lillian Hellman

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Don’t a prisoner of habit

• Habit rules the unreflecting herd. William Wordsworth
• What we call human nature in actuality is human habit. Jewel Kilcher
• Habit

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Let go of the need to compare yourself with others

• Ignore society’s comparisons. Constantly checking your life against one of society’s prewritten stories of how things ‘should’ be is a phony way of living.  One day you will wake up and there won’t be any more time to do the things you’ve always wanted to do. Do it now.  Paulo Coelho
• Comparison

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Let go of the need to constantly please

• It is in vain to hope to please all alike. Let a man stand with his face in what direction he will, he must necessarily turn his back on one half of the world.  George Dennison Prentice
• Approval seeking

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Being a non-conformist requires courage

• He who would be a man must therefore be a non-conformist. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Every man who is truly a man must learn to be alone in the midst of all the others, and if need be against all the others. Romain Rolland
• The opposite of bravery is not cowardice but conformity. Robert Anthony
• The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity. Rollo May
• We must beware of yielding to the pressure of a spirit of cowardly conformity which proclaims itself everybody’s friend in the hope that everybody will obligingly return the compliment. Antonin Sertillanges
• The opposite for courage is not cowardice it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.  Jim Hightower
• Courage

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Dare to be labelled eccentric; even weird

• I am not eccentric. It’s just that I am more alive than most people.  I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish. Dame Edith Sitwell
• Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric. Bertrand Russell
• I used to think anyone doing anything weird was weird. Now I know that it is the people that call others weird that are weird. Paul McCartney

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Date to be labelled crazy

• Those who dance are considered crazy by those who dont hear the music. George Carlin
• We need a little dose of craziness to break the shackles of the norm. Geraldine Evans
• Sometimes I’m doing things considered crazy by others, but then my heart giggles. That’s when I know I am doing the right thing. Dodinsky
• Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. Rob Siltanen
• Anyone who strays too far from the majority view or the conventional wisdom is bound to be labeled “arrogant,”“a maverick,” “a Wildman,”“weird,” or even “crazy. John Eliot, Ph.D.

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Dare to be different

• You laugh at me because I am different; I laugh because you are all the same. Daniel Knode
• As long as it doesn’t harm anyone, change your opinions now and then and be unashamedly contradictory. Paulo Coelho
• …in all the woods and forests, God did not create a single leaf the same as any other… People go against nature because they lack the courage to be different. Paulo Coelho
• You were born an original. Don’t die a copy. John Mason
• We are all born originals. Why is it so many of us die copies? Edward Young
• Champion the right to be yourself; dare to be different and to set your own pattern, live your own life, and follow your own star. Wilfred Peterson
• Uniqueness,  Diversity

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Dare to stand out

• Why fit in when you were born to stand out? Seuss
• Why are trying so hard to fit in, when you’re born to stand out. Oliver James
• Stand out from the crowd, be yourself. Stephen Richards

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Dare to follow your heart, not the herd

• To dare to be different is to live your life your own way. Following your heart rather than following the crowd gives you much more chance to find happiness and fulfillment, but it takes courage. Many people are afraid of being different, of not being accepted by those around them, and of standing out rather than blending in.  Amanda Harvey
• You will not connect with your muse by following the herd; most of them are rambling over a cliff. Alan Cohen
• Do what you love

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Dare to be unashamedly you

• It is better to be ridiculously you, than ridiculously boring by trying to be the same as everyone else. Marc and Angel Chernoff
• We see your world trying to get agreement. You gather together in your groups. You feel strength in your groups. But it is not valid strength. It is bogus strength. It is not true strength. For true strength only comes from the alignment between you and You. Abraham-Hicks
• Insist on yourself; never imitate. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• There’s a point… when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities. Ursula K. Le Guin
• Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind. Seuss
• The Element is about discovering yourself, and you can’t do this if you’re trapped in a compulsion to conform. You can’t be yourself in a swarm. Sir Ken Robinson
• If I try to be like him, who will try to be like me?
• We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own or to other people’s models, learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open. Shakti Gawain
• Be who you are

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Dare to embrace your uniqueness

• By not biting the bait of societal myths about perfection, you will reveal your own unique character. Michael Bernard Beckwith
• I am a rare species, not a stereotype.  Ivan E. Coyote
• In the moment of our creation we receive the stamp of our individuality; and much of life is spent in rubbing off or defacing the impression. Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare
• Each of our voices has something unique to say. Not only should I not mold my life to the demands of external conformity; I can’t even find the model by which to live outside myself.  I can only find it within. Charles Taylor
• Nature made us individuals, as she did the flowers and the pebbles; but we are afraid to be peculiar, and so our society resembles a bag of marbles, or a string of mold candles. Why should we all dress after the same fashion?  The frost never paints my windows twice alike. Lydia Maria Child
• Uniqueness

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Dare to risk being misunderstood

• A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to- morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today. – ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’— Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Understanding,  Risk taking

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Dare to sing your own tune and dance to your own music

• He who joyfully marches to music 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 fully suffice.  Albert Einstein
• You don’t get harmony when everybody sings the same note. Doug Floyd
• If one does not keep pace with one’s companions, perhaps it is because he or she hears a different drummer. Let that person step to the music which he or she hears, however measured or far away.  It is not important that we should mature as soon as an apple-tree or an oak. Shall we turn our spring into summer? Henry David Thoreau
• Life is a song

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Dare to embrace diversity

• The plague of humankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, monomedicine.  The belief that there is only one right way to live, only one right way to regulate religious, political, sexual, medical affairs is the root cause of the greatest threat to people: members of our own species, bent on ensuring our salvation, security, and sanity. Thomas Stephen Szasz
• Diversity

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Dare to follow your own path …

• They will say you are on the wrong road if it is your own. Antonio Porchia
• Don’t think you’re on the right road just because it’s a well-beaten path.
• Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. Robert Frost
• Never be afraid to tread the path alone. Know which is your path and follow it… wherever it may lead you. Do not feel you have to follow someone else. Eileen Caddy
• Our way is not soft grass, it’s a mountain path with lots of rocks. But it goes upwards, forward, toward the sun. Ruth Westheimer
• If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success. John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
• The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of people; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep  the ruts of tradition and conformity! Henry David Thoreau Walden
• Follow your own path

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… even if it means blazing your own trail …

• Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• This is my way; where is yours?— Thus I answered those who asked me ‘the way.’ For the way—that does not exist. Friedrich Nietzsche
• You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or a path, it is someone else’s path. You are not on your own path. If you follow someone else’s way, you are not going to realize your potential. Joeseph Campbell
• We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey. John Hope Franklin
• To be a genuine individualist requires a great deal of strength and courage. It is never easy to chart new territory, to cross new frontiers, or to introduce subtle shadings to an established color.  Toller Cranston

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Dare to think differently from the crowd

• If everyone is thinking alike then somebody isn’t thinking. George S. Patton
• Most people are more comfortable with old problems than with new solutions.
• Read every day something no one else is reading. Think every day something no one else is thinking. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity. Christopher Darlington Morley
• The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking. K. Galbraith
• There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and forty-eight. Ezra Pound
• We need – and should encourage and honour – not only discoverers of facts hitherto unknown but explorers of ideas and rethinkers of values. Walter Moberly
• If you don’t control your mind, someone else will. John Allston
• Never accept the proposition that just because a solution satisfies a problem, that it must be the only solution. Raymond E. Feist
• Don’t be seduced by popular culture. It prevents you from thinking for yourself.  Tim Hansel
• What would people think about if they were not taught what to think about? Arthur Morgan

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Dare to break free of public opinion

• Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul. Mark Twain
• New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common. John Locke
• The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.  Samuel Butler
• Public opinion is a compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs. Robert Peel
• Public opinion… requires us to think other men’s thoughts, to speak other men’s words, to follow other men’s habits. Walter Bagehot
• I’m not sure I want popular opinion on my side – I’ve noticed those with the most opinions often have the fewest facts. Bethania McKenstry
• But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip service to their authority that we become sometimes most keenly conscious that we do not believe a word that we are saying. Virginia Woolf
• Conventional opinion is the ruin of our souls. Rumi
• Patterning your life around others’ opinions is nothing more than slavery. Lawana Blackwell
• The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.  Bertrand Russell

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Dare to embrace new ideas

• One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea. Walter Bagehot
• I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.  John Cage
• Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one.  Elbert Hubbard
• Explore new ideas

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Dare to question conventions and assumptions

• The most damaging phrase in the language is: ‘It’s always been done that way.’ Grace Murray Hopper
• Slaying sacred cows makes great steaks. Dick Nicolosi
• 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
• Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it – even if I have said it – unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense. Buddha
• If you believe everything you read, you better not read. Japanese Proverb
• Superficial people are those who simply go along without a question in the world–asking nothing, troubled by nothing, examining nothing. Whatever people around them do, they do, too. That’s a sad and plastic life–routine and comfortable, maybe, but still sad. Joan Chittister
• Dare to have a healthy relationship with doubt
• Doubt is healthy. It tests one’s convictions.
• I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education. Wilson Mizner
• Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt. Clarence Darrow
• The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful, is the cause of half their errors. John Stuart Mill
• Assumption

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When you’re on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect

• Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. Mark Twain
• If a million people say a foolish thing – it is still a foolish thing. Anatole France
• Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people. Giordano Bruno
• Do you think it’s possible for an entire nation to be insane? Terry Pratchett
• It is not worth an intelligent man’s time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that. H. Hardy
• Everything popular is wrong. Oscar Wilde
• Sometimes the majority only means that all the fools are on the same side.
• Things are not to be judged good or bad merely because the public thinks so. Publius Cornelius Tacitus
• Reflection,  Thinking

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After all, our modern, materialistic society is not exactly a glowing beacon of mastery and well being

• If you’re planning to embark on a master’s journey, you might find yourself bucking current trends in American life. Our hyped- up consumerist society is engaged, in fact, in an all out war on mastery. George Leonard
• We unplug ourselves from the grid by recognizing that we will never cure our restlessness by contributing our disposable income to the bottom line of Bullshit, Inc. but only by doing our work. Steven Pressfield
• Whether we acknowledge it or not, we all have a choice to be either accomplices in the status quo or everyday revolutionaries. We have a choice whether to succumb to the cultural trance, eat fast food, and race by each other in the night, or to build lives of caring, substance and healing. So much depends on that choice. John Robbins
• By some estimates, depression in the year 2000 was about ten times as likely as depression in the year 1900. Barry Schwartz
• Being well adjusted to a sick society is not an indication of health. Jiddu Krishnamurti
• In 12 years of education the most important lesson I have learned is that what we see as “normal” living is truly a travesty of our potential. In a society so governed by superficiality, appearances, and petty economics, dreams are more real than anything anything in the “real world”. Refuse normalcy. Stay free of materialism. Dominic Owen Mallary
• Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces “nice” people, not heroes. Peter Kreeft
• I was part of that strange race of people aptly described as spending their lives doing things they detest to make money they don’t want to buy things they don’t need to impress people they dislike. Emile Henry Gauvreau
• Mastery,  Well-being

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To conform to a sick society is not to be well

• It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. Jiddu Krishnamurti
• The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted. Aldous Huxley

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Break free of the seductions of society, especially the lure of the media

• Begin to consciously break your agreement with the mediocrity present in the tyranny of trends. No longer consider trendsetters as people who are to be admired or imitated. Break free from the hold of what society tells us we should be like. Be drawn into the presence of those who exemplify the next level of human evolution—a spiritual teacher or spiritual community. Each of us has arrived on planet Earth to behold, to participate in the adventure of exploring the truth that we are enlightened beings having a human incarnation. Michael Bernard Beckwith
• Of course, the most powerful obstacles to living in resonance with the highest goal come from the media, our schools, our parents and friends—our society. All of them tell us to chase a successful life that will be admired by others. We buy into the game that society convinces us we should be playing, even if it draws us away from who we are at the core. We miss some of our greatest moments. We rationalize them away. We can’t put them together into a consistent way of living our lives because we allow ourselves to be distracted by the picture of success and the good life that these forces of society offer us. Michael Ray
• We must break free of the seductions of society and live life on our own terms, under our own values and aligned with our original dreams. Robin Sharma
• Do not be misled by what you see around you, or be influenced by what you see. You live in a world which is a playground of illusion, full of false paths, false values and false ideals. But you are not part of that world. Sai Baba
• If you sincerely desire a truly well-rounded education, you must study the extremists, the obscure and “nutty.” You need the balance!  Your poor brain is already being impregnated with middle-of-the- road crap, twenty-four hours a day, no matter what. Network TV, newspapers, radio, magazines at the supermarket… even if you never watch, read, listen, or leave your house, even if you are deaf and blind, the telepathic pressure alone of the uncountable normals surrounding you will insure that you are automatically well-grounded in consensus reality.  Ivan Stang
• We get trapped and configured in patterns of consumption, patterns of social organization, of education and value systems that don’t seem to be feeding that sense of our original being. We fight ourselves, repeating other people’s games and being fed their appetites and their amusements. James O’Dea
• The media

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Find out for yourself what is true and live that truth, not what society tells you

• You know what is right. Deep down, you know. The battle between your true wisdom and the counterfeit wisdom of society is what causes frustration. Refuse to compromise with what you know is right—with what is right for you. Vernon Howard
• It is very easy to conform to what your society or your parents and teachers tell you. That is a safe and easy way of existing; but that is not living…To live is to find out for yourself what is true. Jiddu Krishnamurti
• Everything will line up perfectly when knowing and living the truth becomes more important than looking good. Alan Cohen
• Truth

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Being a nonconformist doesn’t mean you go out your way to conspicuously be a rebel

• Be neither a conformist or a rebel, for they are really the same thing. Find your own path, and stay on it.  Paul Vixie
• The fastest way to succeed is to look as if you’re playing by other people’s rules, while quietly playing by your own. Michael Korda

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Nonconformity for the sake of nonconformity is conformity

• Nonconformity for the sake of nonconformity is conformity. When people try too hard to be different, they usually end up being just like everyone else who is trying to be different.  Don’t conform to nonconformity for the sake of it.  Mindfully evaluate the circumstances. Once you fully understand your options, make the decision that works best for you.  Marc and Angel Chernoff
• If you properly evaluate the circumstances and conclude that the masses are indeed correct, you would be foolish to run the other way, or practice any form of nonconformity. Marc and Angel Chernoff
• 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
• Blindly rejecting the mainstream is pretty stupid. Non-conformity for the sake of non-conforming is still conformity. Jonathan Mead
• Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?  James Thurber

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Sometimes there’s no choice but to conform but do it consciously

• Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you’re not really interested in order to get where you’re going. Christopher Morley
• We submit to the majority because we have to. But we are not compelled to call our attitude of subjection a posture of respect.  Ambrose Bierce
• We are half ruined by conformity; but we should be wholly ruined without it. Charles Dudley Warner
• Living consciously

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• To be dragged in the wake of the passive flock and to pass a hundred and one times beneath the shears of the shepherd, or to die alone like a brave eagle on a rocky crag of a great mountain: that is the dilemma. Praxedis Guerrero
• How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.  Marcus Aurelius
• But human beings are not machines, and however powerful the pressure to conform, they sometimes are so moved by what they see as injustice that they dare to declare their independence. In that historical possibility lies hope. Howard Zinn
• Each one of us, as long as life stirs is us, may play a part in extricating ourselves from the power system by asserting our primacy as people in quiet acts of mental or physical withdrawal—in gestures of non-conformity, in abstentions, restrictions, inhibitions, which will liberate us from the domination of the pentagon of power. Lewis Mumford
• How far should one accept the rules of the society in which one lives? To put it another way: at what point does conformity become corruption? Only by answering such questions does the conscience truly define itself. Kenneth Tynan

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• The young always have the same problem – how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and co    pying one another.  Quentin Crisp
• Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?  James Thurber
• Sometimes the road is less traveled for a reason. Proverb
• If I try to be like him, who will try to be like me?
• I try not to break the rules, but merely to test their elasticity. Bill Veeck
• Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.  Mignon McLaughlin
• The opposite for courage is not cowardice it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.  Jim Hightower