Breaking societal norms Quotes

The social system is taking on a form in which finding out what you want to do is less and less of an option because your life is too structured, organised, controlled and disciplined.

In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric.

You are born and then you die, but in between you can do anything you want. It's society that creates rules for us, but you can break out of that.

Getting to a place where I am comfortable saying things was hard-earned for me. I've chewed on the ground glass of my own experience. I saw Gloria Steinem speak, and I was just like, Shut the front door. She was saying that she didn't come into her own until her 40s, and she was asking herself the question, Why should she have to get married? And I just thank God someone asked that question, right? I think we're the first generation of women asking ourselves certain questions and deciding for ourselves.

I decided when I was 19 that I didn't like all these stereotypes that I was supposed to fit into. I wasn't comfortable and they made me very unhappy. So I tried and I spent a miserable summer, and then I went back to school and said, 'I'm going to do my own thing because I think I have a thing to do. I'm not going to live in anybody else's image because I don't like that.' I felt much better. I didn't do it to rebel against anybody or anything.

The most fun in breaking a rule is in knowing what rule you're breaking.

One of the most rebellious things a woman can do is allow people to think she’s mean.

I preach freedom of the mind through freedom of the body; women, for example - out of the prison of corsets.

It is the woman who controls the whole house...it's her job, that's what she's supposed to do...We have to change this idea that women are not only supposed to work in the house...but she also has the ability to go outside and do business, to be a doctor, to be a teacher, to be an engineer, she should be allowed to have any job she likes. She should be treated equally, as men are.

Abandonment of slavery is also the banishment of the chimera of security. The world will not change overnight, and liberation will not happen unless individual women agree to be outcasts, eccentrics, perverts, and whatever the powers-that-be choose to call them.

Unless you drop your personality you will not be able to find your individuality. Individuality is given by existence; personality is imposed by the society.

I had dreams. And I had to pursue them; otherwise my soul would have shriveled. The hardest part was allowing myself to want something other than what was socially acceptable, telling myself to go after it, then actually doing it.

The premise of Kiss has always been to not live within the confinements and boundaries other people set for themselves. We set our own limitations, and those are no limitations.

I think if human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween. Wouldn't life be more interesting that way? And now that I think about it, why the heck don't they? Who made the rule that everybody has to dress like sheep 364 days of the year? Think of all the people you'd meet if they were in costume every day. People would be so much easier to talk to - like talking to dogs.

You must not let yourself become too respectable. Keep yourself a little wild. What is life for, if not for the living of it?

The ladies pass the timee with gossip and hearsay. This is what they have in place of freedom- gime and gossip. Their lives are small and careful. I do not wish to live this way. I should like to make my mark. To venture opinions that may not be polite or even correct but are mine nonetheless. If I am to be hanged for anything, I should like to feel that I go to the gallows on my own strength.

I had been a girl of whom certain things were expected, none of them too bad: a career as a nurse, for example; a sense of duty to my parents; obedience to the law and worship of convention. But in one year of being away from home, that girl had gone out of existence.

How rarely I meet with a man who can be free, even in thought! We all live according to rule. Some men are bedridden; all world-ridden.

Today's youth seem finally to have understood that only by freeing woman from her exclusively sexual role can man free himself from his ordained role in the rat-race: that of the rat.

Because you are women, people will force their thinking on you, their boundaries on you. They will tell you how to dress, how to behave, who you can meet and where you can go. Don't live in the shadows of people's judgement. Make your own choices in the light of your own wisdom.

Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.

So what if I'm ninety-three? So what if I'm ancient and cranky and my body's a wreck? If they're willing to accept me and my guilty conscience, why the hell shouldn't I run away with the circus?

Even though I was 34 or 35 or something. I was like, “People can do that? Women can actually just say what they think?” It was an extraordinary experience to do that movie with her because every day was a lesson in how to just be yourself.

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force.

Freedom lies outside the pattern of society; but to be free of that pattern you have to understand the whole content of it, which is to understand your own mind.