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Conformism Quotes

Browse 22 quotes about Conformism.

Conformism Quotes

“— А ну, — сказала мама, — разорви эту книгу, клади в печку и разжигай. Книг у нас было много, мама собирала их и постоянно покупала новые. И вот она стала пересматривать их, стопу за стопой — и отправлять в печь. Книги горят долго и упрямо, их надо ворошить кочергой. [...] Особенно жаль было великолепно иллюстрированных, переплетенных годовых комплектов «Иностранной литературы» с 1890 по 1910 год, напечатанную при царе «Русскую историю в картинах», не говоря уж о книгах Горького. — Это вредительские книги, — объяснила мать. Понятно. Если в школе тетради жгут, то вредительские книги надо и подавно — в печь. Горький не так давно умер, но вокруг все шепотом говорили, что его отравили. Сперва сына его убили, а потом и самого «залечили» в Кремлевской больнице. А раз такое дело, лучше его книг не держать. Но я буквально завизжал, когда к сожжению были приговорены японские сказки: — Не надо, мама, не надо! Это была самая любимая книга моего детства, по ней я выучился читать. В ней рассказывалось о занятных и поучительных историях, происходивших с мальчиком Таро и девочкой Такой, а на картинках были прудики с золотыми рыбками и японские домики среди карликовых сосенок. Я вцепился в книгу, а мать стала вырывать, и она была сильнее, и мои Таро и Такой полетели в огонь. Обложка была плотная, лакированная и долго не хотела гореть. Лежит великолепная детская книга среди огня — и не горит. — Японцы — капиталисты и наши враги, — сказала мать. — Нельзя держать в доме японские книги. Чтобы я не разревелся, она дала мне ножницы и велела кромсать семейные фотографии. Ставила крест на лицах, которые надо вырезать, это были враги народа, и я их аккуратно вырезал. Что-то у нас оказалось подозрительно много знакомых врагов народа. После моей обработки фотографии выглядели презабавно. Вот, например, большая групповая фотография, ряды проглотивших аршин мужчин и женщин, надпись: «Учительская конференция 1935 года». А в этих рядах теперь, после моих ножниц, — пустые дырки в форме человеческих силуэтов, словно не люди были, а привидения. Все они оказались врагами народа, теперь их уж нет, их надо забыть [88—89].”

FearTerrorOblivionStalinismConformismBurning Books
Book:Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel
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“Astonishing, of course, that those very terms - 'reeducation' and 'rehabilitation' - do not scare the hell out of academics who use them and hear them. That they do not call to mind the not-so-distant history of authoritarian regimes in Europe or lead on to the thought that 'diversity,' for many of us in the academy, has now come to mean a plurality of sameness. More important: the words, apparently, do not suggest how vulnerable we are - all of us - to error, slippage, and hurt, and how the protocols, tribunals, and shamings currently favored by many in the academy have distracted us from our primary obligation, which is to foster an atmosphere of candor, good will, kindness, and basic decency without which we can be of no use to one another or to our students.”

KindnessHonestyCivilityAuthoritarianismConformismSocial Justice WarriorsVirtue Signaling
Book:The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies
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“Standing alone today demands even more courage and strength than it did in former cultures. From infancy, children have been programmed to perform. Rather than living from their own needs and feelings, they learn to assess situations in order to please others. Without an inner core of certainty grounded in their own musculature, they lack the inner resources to stand alone. Pummelled by mass media and peer group pressures, their identity may be utterly absorbed by collective stereotypes. In the absence of adequate rites of passage, ad-men become the high priests of an initiation into the addictions of consumerism.”

MediaIndividualityConformityConsumerismIndependent ThinkingModern CultureConformism
Book:The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation
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“So the experience I have of my everyday work environment is of a conformist, claustrophobic and repressive verbal universe, a penitential domain of reason-mongering in which hyperactivity in detail—the endlessly repeated shouts of “why,” the rebuttals, calls for “evidence,” qualifications and quibbles—stands in stark contrast to the immobility and self-referentiality of the structure as a whole. I suffer from recurrent bouts of nausea in the face of this densely woven tissue of “arguments,” most of which are nothing but blinds for something else altogether, generally something unsavory; and I feel an urgent need to exit from it altogether.”

PhilosophyWorkExitConformism
Book:A World without Why
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“Когда люди живут в таких обстоятельствах, когда происходят ужасные вещи на их глазах, многие закрывают глаза и не хотят ничего знать, видеть. Потому что знать, видеть и понимать — это очень опасно. Многие рассуждали так: если я буду это знать, об этом думать, я начну об этом говорить. Тогда со мной самим что-то случится, я никому ничем не помогу, поэтому я не буду знать и не буду думать, пока меня это не коснулось. И сейчас так тоже многие думают.”

FearSilenceEscapismUssrStalinismConformismPutinism
Author:Владимир Войнович
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“I long to get away, sometimes, from my own generation. I don't care whether it's into the past, or into the future, so long as it's away from the patter into simple realities again. I hate being a slave to my own age. ... We are so afraid of sentimentality that we're losing the power of human feeling. Our writers today understand all the brutalities and cynicisms; but how many of them understand the simple human affections that hold decent human beings together and make the world worth living in?”

HumanismLiberalismModernismConventionalityConformismSentimentalism
Book:The Sun Cure
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“Dr Igor paused but he knew that Mari was following his reasoning. "So let's turn to your illness. Each human being is unique. Each with their own qualities, instincts, forms of pleasure, and desire for adventure. However, society always imposes on us a collective way of behaving. And people never stop to wonder why they should behave like that. They just accept it, the way typist accepted the fact that the qwerty keyboard is the best possible one. How you ever met anyone in your entire life who asked, why the hands of a clock should go in one particular direction, and not in the other?" "No" "If someone were to ask, the response they got would probably be, you are mad! If they persisted people would try to come up with a reason but they'd soon change the subject because there isn't a reason apart from the one I just given you. So, to go back to your question, what was it again?" "Am I cured?" "No, you are someone who is different. But who wants to be the same as everyone else. And that, in my view, is a serious illness." "Is wanting to be different a serious illness?" "It is if you force yourself to be the same as everyone else. It causes neurosis, psychosis and paranoia. It's a distortion of nature, it goes against god's laws for in all the world's woods and forests, he did not create a single leaf the same as another".”

MadnessMental IllnessUniqueness Of IndividualConformism
Book:Veronika Decides to Die
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“För att göra sig gällande här måste han bli som de andra, inte som Bogglund och drömmaren, utan som förmannen och Fågel blå. Då måste han, med befordringsdrömmarna hela tiden starkt levande inom sig lära sig klättra väl men icke fort. Han måste sparka till dem som ville komma om honom, alltid passa på, när ingen såg honom, smickra sig in hos de överordnade och lära sig intrigerna, så att intrigerna icke som bumeranger kom tillbaks. Han måste begränsa sig, envetet hålla sig inom gränsen, aldrig mera anse sig ha råd att göra en generös eftergift bara av nöjet att få göra den. Det var det man menade med "att sköta sig". (Sid. 225)”

Workplace PoliticsConformism1930s StockholmBootlickingSnakes And Ladders
Book:Kungsgatan
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“[С]вобода попервах здається хорошим обмінним товаром. Спершу її міняють на харчі, потім на те, щоб завжди було не гірше, ніж тепер (стабільність), потім на безпеку, і тільки потім-потім виявляється, що немає ні харчів, ні безпеки, ні стабільності, ні свободи [91].”

FreedomRussiaPutinConformism
Book:Малиновый пеликан
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“a perfect description of the “automatic cultural man”—man as confined by culture, a slave to it, who imagines that he has an identity if he pays his insurance premium, that he has control of his life if he guns his sports car or works his electric toothbrush. Today the inauthentic or immediate men are familiar types, after decades of Marxist and existentialist analysis of man’s slavery to his social system. But in Kierkegaard’s time it must have been a shock to be a modern European city-dweller and be considered a Philistine at the same time. For Kierkegaard “philistinism” was triviality, man lulled by the daily routines of his society, content with the satisfactions that it offers him: in today’s world the car, the shopping center, the two-week summer vacation. Man is protected by the secure and limited alternatives his society offers him, and if he does not look up from his path he can live out his life with a certain dull security: Devoid of imagination, as the Philistine always is, he lives in a certain trivial province of experience as to how things go, what is possible, what usually occurs… . Philistinism tranquilizes itself in the trivial…”

ConsumerismConformismPhilistinismAutomatism
Book:The Denial of Death
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“Are we to conclude that these chief gods, Zeus and Yahweh, did not wish humankind to have moral consciousness and the arts of civilization? It is a mystery indeed. The most obvious explanation is that the creative artist and poet and saint must fight the actual (as contrasted to the ideal) gods of our society—the god of conformism as well as the gods of apathy, material success, and exploitative power. These are the “idols” of our society that are worshiped by multitudes of people.”

HumankindConsumerismGodsCivilisationCreative ArtistsConformismNonconformismAnticonformismMoral Consciousness
Book:The Courage to Create
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“It is when we think we can act like God, that all respect is lost, and I think this is the downfall of peace. We lie if we say we do not see color and culture and difference. We fool ourselves and cheat ourselves when we say that all of us are the same. We should not want to be the same as others and we should not want others to be the same as us. Rather, we ought to glory and shine in all of our differences, flaunting them fabulously for all to see! It is never a conformity that we need! We need not to conform! What we need is to burst out into all these beautiful colors!”

LifeInspirationalInspirationInspirational QuotesHumanityDifferencesFreedomRaceColorInspirational LifeLivingHumanRespectHumanismConformityDifferenceConformism
Author:C. JoyBell C.
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“His importance to the century just past, and therefore his status as a figure in history as well as in literature, derives from the extraordinary salience of the subjects he ‘took on,’ and stayed with, and never abandoned. As a consequence, we commonly use the term ‘Orwellian’ in one of two ways. To describe a state of affairs as ‘Orwellian’ is to imply crushing tyranny and fear and conformism. To describe a piece of writing as ‘Orwellian’ is to recognize that human resistance to these terrors is unquenchable. Not bad for one short lifetime.”

WritingFearCourageTyrannyGeorge OrwellConformismOrwellianism
Author:Christopher Hitchens
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“Мы как раз вчера встречались и говорили об этом с правозащитниками, — и были вынуждены признать, что россиян никакая кровь не вызовет на улицы. То есть если написать, что вчера погибли одномоментно 200 тысяч чеченцев, скажут — ну, много, — но не более того. Люди не выйдут. Более того, если погибнут 200 тысяч жителей Твери — тоже не выйдут. Такова ситуация на сегодняшний день. Общество очень ожесточилось.”

ViolenceRussiaIndifferenceApathyPassivityConformism
Author:Анна Политковская
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