Frederica Mathewes-Green Quotes

Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

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.

In junior high, I really wanted to be popular. Suddenly there were parties with boys, and I wanted to be part of that. There was a group of girls, and I wanted to be friends with them.

Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal - a sort of 'voting' situation. But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.

Peer pressure and social norms are powerful influences on behaviour, and they are classic excuses.

My message isn't perfectly defined. I have, as a human being, fallen to peer pressure.

There is nothing that makes more cowards and feeble men than public opinion.

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

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

I understand that if someone's going to make me his idea of cool, I can't control that.

I started off dancing and playing sports, and I joined the drama stuff, the theatre stuff in middle school because my friends were involved, and it was kind of the cool thing to do.

I think I was a pretty normal student; I just followed most of my friends.

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.

When I was young, running with a gang was a cool thing to do; that's how you get popular; that's how you get the girls.

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

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.

Most people live their life around what other people do.

I just felt being part of my peer group so strongly. I was immersed in teen culture, but not taken in by it.

Most of us are 'ultraconformists' when it comes to who we are most likely to follow... to socialise with, or even who we are most likely to hire.

I don't need to hang out in a posse and try to act cool.

When I entered high school I was an A-student, but not for long. I wanted the fancy clothes. I wanted to hang out with the guys. I went from being an A-student to a B-student to a C-student, but I didn't care. I was getting the high fives and the low fives and the pats on the back. I was cool.

When in doubt, look at what everyone else is doing.

Peer pressure is a huge part of youth behavior, whether one grows up in Washington, D.C., or Cody, Wyo.

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.