Eric Hoffer Quotes

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

Conformity is the ape of harmony.

I'd rather look ridiculous when everybody else does than plain and sensible all by myself.

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.

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.

People just don't realize how much peer pressure, the desire for peer acclamation, influences them.

You know, our sense of individuality is just the number one target of civilization.

None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world.

I believe people think as a group more often than we might realize or care to admit. We like to believe that we act as individuals and nothing more, but time and again - in corporations and business, in politics and religion, in fashion and culture, and in friendships and social circles - we think and do as one.

Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

Everybody wants to be like everybody else.

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

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

People aren't autonomous creatures. They're under a lot of pressure themselves.

Young people want to look like peas in a pod, and there is no use trying to make them different.

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?

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

But when the group is literally capable of changing our perceptions, and when to stand alone is to activate primitive, powerful, and unconscious feelings of rejection, then the health of these institutions seems far more vulnerable than we think.

There is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone.

The problem is that we humans are deep conformists.

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.

Human beings are a social species. We like to hang together in groups, just like wildebeests, just like lions. Wildebeests don't hang with lions because lions eat wildebeests. Human beings are like that. We do what that group does that we're trying to identify with.