“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: ‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
“Any fool can make a rule
And any fool will mind it.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Journal #14
“It’s weird not to be weird.”
― John Lennon
“Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods
“Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.”
― John F. Kennedy
“If you are always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be.”
― Maya Angelou
“Plants are more courageous than almost all human beings: an orange tree would rather die than produce lemons, whereas instead of dying the average person would rather be someone they are not.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple-tree or
an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer?”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods
“What I must do, is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live 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: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series
“Most people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their opinions as the result of their own thinking—and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as those of the majority.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
“There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.”
― Fernando Pessoa
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