Lao Tzu Quotes

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

I grew up in a small town where everyone wanted to be the same or look the same and was afraid to be different.

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.

Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to drink other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.

At every point I am besieged by people who would like me to conform to some social norm of whatever sort of social group they expect me to be a part of. I never have any identification with these social groups.

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.

People are always going to identify with what it's like living in society and have people judge you in certain ways, and how you can be strong enough to be your own person and all those good things.

When I was a kid, I was afraid of large group of conforming people.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.

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

We live in a world that tells us not to care, to consume everything in sight. It tells us that being cool and being an individual actually means buying what everyone else is buying and doing what everyone else is doing.

Now, in music, it seems more like the popular crowd suppresses anyone who is different.

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.

The undignified mania of adaptive conformity, exhibited by many of my kinsmen, has always been very repulsive to me.

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.

When we find ourselves in groups or with charismatic individuals, we might do things we wouldn't ordinarily do.

I wasn't like the rest of the kids. I was an artist. Living in a black society, when you're raised around a bunch of boys who plays sports and chase girls, there's this perception of masculinity that's super hard to fit into. I wasn't the stereotype of that like a lot of my peers were.

People sometimes are afraid to be who they are because of other people's ideals.

How can we choose to selectively follow what we find comfortable and attack anybody who tries to break free from the norms that we choose to set?