Mark Twain Quotes

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.

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.

Young people in my generation were sort of in lockstep, and it wasn't just the '40s, either. In the '30s and in the '50s it was the same. No one ever dropped out unless he got sick or got kicked out.

The race of man, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity.

To do exactly as your neighbors do is the only sensible rule.

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.

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.

We laugh at sheep because sheep just follow the one in front. We humans have out-sheeped the sheep, because at least the sheep need a sheep dog to keep them in line. Humans keep each other in line. And they do it by ridiculing or condemning anyone who commits the crime, and that’s what it’s become, of being different.

Men are sheep. Where one goes, the rest will soon follow. -Lady Whistledown

Most people are sheep, and they need the support of others.

The majority have no other reason for their opinions than that they are the fashion.

Everybody's private motto: It's better to be popular than right.

The women all had big minds because they were big animals, but they didn't use them for this reason: unusual ideas could make enemies and the women, if they were going to achieve any sort of comfort and safety, needed all the friends they could get. So, in the interest of survival they trained themselves to be agreeing machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking and then they thought it too.

The only law which is really lived up to wholeheartedly and with a vengeance is the law of conformity.

I've always thought that anyone who needs to join a herd so badly must be a bit of a sheep himself.

I've been amazed at how fast and herd-like opinions in the United States are.

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

I'm a sheep when it comes to opinions; I will change my mind and jump on the bandwagon.

Most people suspend their judgment till somebody else has expressed his own and then they repeat it.

First of all, whoever didn't want to be a member of this association or the other association, was branded, you know, like a dangerous individualist, you know, infected by the Western decadence, you know. So everybody joined.

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.

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