Pick out your favorites:
Here are 21 quotes on conformity and nonconformity that reveal the struggle to and the importance of remaining free in our own minds.
- “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.” – Rudyard Kipling, 1935 (this quote is often misattributed to Nietzsche)
- “Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.” – President John F. Kennedy, 1961 address to the United Nations
- “I don’t give a damn what others say. It’s okay to color outside the lines.” – Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970), musician
- “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance (1841)
- “Rebel children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory.” – Russell Brand, My Booky Wook, 2008
- “Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.” – Graham Greene (1904-1991), author
- “Not all those who wander are lost.” – J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (1954)
- “For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance (1841)
- “The opposite of bravery is not cowardice but conformity.” – Dr. Robert Anthony, The Ultimate Secret to Total Self-Confidence
- “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).” – Mark Twain, notebook (1904)
- “All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.” – Adlai Stevenson, Address at Princeton, 1954
- “Go your own way. Question everything. Accept nothing. Accept no dogma, no cant. There are too many people walking around thinking they’re sacred cows, and they’re only half right.” – Rosie DiManno (b. 1956), Canadian journalist
- “I think the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself.” – Rita Mae Brown (b. 1944), author
- “Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.” – Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
- “It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations―past and present―are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual’s hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millennia.” – Eric Hoffer (1898-1983), moral philosopher
- “Perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.” – Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
- “If I decide to be an idiot, then I’ll be an idiot on my own accord.” – Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
- “It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.” – James Baldwin (1924-1987), author
- “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 (1724-1788)
- “Only a very small number of people are truly evil. But a very large number of people are conformists. To prevent evil on a mass scale it’s more important for us to ward against our own instinct to conform with the crowd than it is to worry about anything else.” – Claire Lehman, founding editor of Quillette
- “Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” – Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”
“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” Mark Twain
“Many successful political careers have been built on giving Blacks ‘favors’ that look good on the surface but do lasting damage in the long run. One of these ‘favors’ was the welfare state. A vastly expanded welfare state in the 1960s destroyed the black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and generations of racial oppression.” Thomas Sowell
“The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails.” John Maxwell
“What rules the world is idea, because ideas define the way reality is perceived.” Irving Krystol
“The enemy of liberal capitalism today is not so much socialism as nihilism (the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless).” Irving Krystol
“Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions – it only guarantees equality of opportunity.” Irving Krystol
