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Conformity

I had an immense advantage over many others dealing with the problem inasmuch as I had no fixed ideas derived from long-established practice to control and bias my mind, and did not suffer from the general belief that whatever is, is right. – Henry Bessemer (discovered new method of producing steel)

If you believe everything you read, you better not read. – Japanese Proverb

You cannot be both fashionable and first-rate. – Logan Pearsall Smith

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea. – Walter Bagehot

But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip service to their authority that we become sometimes most keenly conscious that we do not believe a word that we are saying. – Virginia Woolf

Conservatism should guide; it usually paralyzes. – Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him. – Jonathan Swift

Every man who is truly a man must learn to be alone in the midst of all the others, and if need be against all the others. – Romain Rolland

Minorities are the stars of the firmament; majorities, the darkness in which they float. – Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)

And who can doubt that it will lead to the worst disorders when minds created free by God are compelled to submit slavishly to an outside will? When we are told to deny our senses and subject them to the will of others? – Galileo Galilei

Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions. – George Santayana

We must not overlook the role that extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent. – Abraham Flexner, Universities, 1930

At the bottom of a good deal of bravery… lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they cannot face public opinion. – E.H. Chapin

Of what use to get what you want if you must become someone else to get it. – Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com

How glorious it is — and also how painful — to be an exception. – Alfred de Musset

Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one. – Elbert Hubbard, The Note-Book, 1927

The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful, is the cause of half their errors. – John Stuart Mill

We submit to the majority because we have to. But we are not compelled to call our attitude of subjection a posture of respect. – Ambrose Bierce, Epigrams

Mental slavery is mental death, and every man who has given up his intellectual freedom is the living coffin of his dead soul. – Robert Ingersoll, Individuality

Custom is, to think a handsome thing in private but tame it down in the utterance. – Mark Twain, 1907, letter to Harriet E. Whitmore