150 quotes found
“All the heroes of tomorrow are the heretics of today.”
“They need a social mechanism to make us require conformity of one other, and the best way to do that is to provide a mechanism to make us punish our own deviants.”
“The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, monomedicine. The belief that there is only one right way to live, only one right way t...”
“Insecurity of the spirit demands completeness elsewhere.”
“make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circu...”
“However, because they have no actual interests of their own (or if they do, they squelch them in order to fit in) and merely pursue those that they think will look best on their college apps, they'...”
“[People] ask themselves, what is suitable for my position? What is usually done by persons of my station and percuniary circumstances? Or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station ...”
“Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden”
“People like us are dead to society unless we’re pretentious, tell people what they want to hear, take off our clothes, or pretend to be like them.”
“But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resist...”
“Society tells me to follow my own truth, but I don't let society tell me what to do. If you need someone to tell you that, chances are you're part of the crowd that will move on to the next fashion...”
“Most people want so desperately to be an individual yet are so easily shaped by the media.”
“There is a time in a boy’s life when the sweetness is pounded out of him; and tenderness, and the ability to show what he feels, is gone.”
“Alas, everything that men say to one another is alike; the ideas they exchange are almost always the same, in their conversation. But inside all those isolated machines, what hidden recesses, what ...”
“Don’t conform. Don’t live in a small dirty pond when the ocean of life is lovingly inviting you.”
“It’s hard being pissed with a nice car and a good job. Fed up on filet medallions and swimming in chilled martinis. We know what we think and our life here is our reward for thinking it.”
“In every southerner, beneath the veneer of clichés lies a much deeper motherlode of cliché. But even cliché is overlaid with enormous power when a child is involved.”
“To hear how much of a great human being you were — even if you really weren’t — open your ears at your funeral.”
“The greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history, because the despotism of Custom is complete. This is the case over the whole East. Custom is there, in all things, the final appeal...”
“Without their uniforms, they were probably nobodies, rejects. Give a man a uniform. Give him a few sparkly badges, a purpose, a gun ... and suddenly, he was no longer just another kid trying to mak...”
