#conformity

The problem with this generation is they are so quick to define who they are in the process of searching. It is their need for immediate acceptance that keeps them from exploring further. ↗

— Shannon L. Alder

#conformity #purpose #religion #religion

My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. "Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?" they asked me the other day. I told them this story: In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day. ↗

— Tom Waits

#individuality #music #musician #non-conformity #humor

It's weird not to be weird. ↗

— John Lennon

#individualism #paradox #individuality

As much as I live I shall not imitate them or hate myself for being different to them ↗

— Orhan Pamuk

#difference #imitation #individuality #conformity

If you stand up and be counted, from time to time you may get yourself knocked down. But remember this: A man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good. ↗

— Thomas J. Watson

#conformity #counted #down #flattened #from time to time

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

— Charles Dudley Warner

#half #ruined #should #wholly #without

Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the danger of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of "crackpot" than the stigma of conformity. ↗

— Thomas John Watson, Sr.

#controversy #crackpot #danger #expose #fear

Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism. ↗

— Barry Goldwater

#been #conformity #creative #despotism #differences

Unfortunately what came out of it was also kind of an imitation community with a lot of mindless conformity. ↗

— Bill Griffith

#came #community #conformity #imitation #kind

I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity. ↗

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#between #bit #conformity #consider #exquisite