Lucy Maud Montgomery Quotes

When people are free to do as we please, they usually imitate each other.

The only behaviour that is truly common is to avoid doing something because you think others might consider it common.

The reason most people don't express their individuality and actually deny it, is not fear of what prime ministers think of us or the head of the federal reserve, It's what their families and their friends down at the bar are going to think of them.

I felt that there were so many people doing it that I would just be like one of the others.

When you're younger, it's all about conformity and being easily influenced - especially in terms of fashion. You just follow the trends. Whatever is hot at the moment, you want to get it. You basically just want to be doing what everyone else is doing. But as you get older, those things aren't as important.

Or about how 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?

If we attach more importance to what other people believe than to what we know to be true - if we value belonging over being - we will not attain authenticity.

Some kids look at me strange in the hallways because I don't decorate my locker.

You look ridiculous if you dance You look ridiculous if you don't dance So you might as well dance.

I went to public school for like, one day. I don't get it. Everybody tries to be exactly the same. I think being an outsider is a good thing.

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.

Just because so many conforming kids wake up every morning asking, 'What is everybody else going to wear today?' doesn't mean that they don't wish it were different. Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

I've always been the girl the kids in school would be like, 'What is she wearing?' Then eventually some trends would stick.

You might as well play at the show everyone else is playing at.

Everybody wants to be like everybody else.

I know how easy it is for some minds to glide along with the current of popular opinion, where influence, respectability, and all those motives which tend to seduce the human heart are brought to bear.

I think a lot of people have lost respect for the individual, you know, the individual, the person who doesn't conform.

Married, you're basically part of the herd, and that makes life easier in a lot of ways in terms of social support. But if you're not by nature a herd animal, you start to feel like you're passing.

When all run by common consent into vice, none appear to do so.

We all feel the urge to conform; it is the most normal of human desires.

I want to be able to wake up and feel like, 'Eh, I feel like wearing this!' Or talking to that person. It's so much more work to have to stay in that box to fit in, 'Mean Girls' style.

I just feel like in society and in public, we have this unspoken expectation that we're all trying to meet. And there's so much pressure to try to fit in.

I just dress how I wanna dress. Not to say that I don't care about how I dress or that I'm a slob or anything like that... I just don't have to worry about the outside opinions of what people are saying.

What is social proof? Put simply, it's the positive influence created when someone finds out that others are doing something. It's also known as informational social influence.