Resisting Conformity Quotes

My own opinion is enough for me. And I claim the right to defend it against any consensus, any majority anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line and kiss my ass.

I wish I could shut up, but I can't, and I won't.

Stand not against the stream.

The man assumes the role of the loner, the thinker and the searching spirit who calls the privileged and the powerful to task. The power of one was the courage to remain separate, th think through the truth and not be beguiled by convention or the plausible arguments of those who expect to maintain power, whatever the cost.

I was never going to be one to just go away quietly and get on with things in the shadows.

We're at a time now where there's a lot more "I'll do whatever it takes" attitude. I'm not going to say or do what you want me to say or do just because it might help me or be the politically correct thing to do to help my career. And that may have hurt me sometimes. I think about different collaborations that have been brought my way - it might have meant I'd get to be on TV to do certain things, but I've said, "No. It doesn't make sense. I'm not doing it." And other people might jump at the opportunity.

The older you get, the more rules they’re gonna try to get you to follow. You just gotta keep livin’ man, l-i-v-i-n’

Success isn't based on 'look what I can do!' but more on an inner sense of self and believing you have something to say in your own consistent way. And I think we all have to fight to maintain our unique style and taste in a world that would have us conform.

Disobedience was man's Original Virtue.

You must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.

But these realities will make themselves felt soon enough and while I am certainly not asking you to close your eyes to the experiences of earlier generations, I want to advise you not to conform too soon and to resist the pressure of practical necessity.

A young man ought to cross his own rules, to awake his vigor, and to keep it from growing faint and rusty. And there is no course of life so weak and sottish as that which is carried on by rule and discipline.

If your writing collides with the conventional wisdom, there's going to be some kind of friction.

People told me to give up trying to be special and settle down to a regular life. There ain't nothing wrong with a regular life, and that's the Lord's truth...but it wasn't for me, because I wanted to be something special. I knew how easy it was for a dream to die. I seen that all around me. You could let it die by just looking the other way.

You've got to stand for something or you'll fall for anything.

They told me many times throughout my career to bite my tongue and I told them my tongue's been bleeding since I was born.

Youth is so exciting. It'll take over. I don't want to be swept away. I want to be with the taking-over people, right to the end.

Nothing is more difficult and nothing requires more character than to find oneself in open opposition to ones time (and those one loves) and to say loudly: No!

My prodigious sin was, and still is, being a non-conformist. Although I am not a Communist I refused to fall in line by hating them.