Conformity
“Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so col-bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences in belief.”
James Russell Lowell, Witchcraft, vol. 2
“Every day is my best day; this is my life; I’m not going to have this moment again.” Bernie Siegel, Love: The Work of the Soul
“In heaven all the interesting people are missing.”
Friederick Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
“People would rather die in the consensus than survive out on a limb.”
Richard Fontaine, Fund Manager [T. Rowe Price], The Washington Post, 3/14/1988
Outliers, Not Fitting In
“If they see breasts and long hair coming they call it woman, If beard and whiskers they call it man: but, look, the self that hovers in between is neither man nor woman.”
Devara Dasimayya, O Ramanatha: Speaking of Siva
“I used to think that anyone doing anything weird was weird. I suddenly realized that anyone doing anything weird wasn’t weird at all and it was the people saying they were weird that were weird.”
Paul McCartney
“Underneath all, I swear nothing is good to me now that ignores individuals.”
Walt Whitman
“In differentiation, not in uniformity, lies the path of progress.”
Louis Dembitz Brndeis, Business: A Profession
Be True to Yourself
“Everyone carries within himself a productive uniqueness as the nucleus of his being.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“Everyone follows his own bent. Man is like a tree. You’ve never quarreled with a fig tree because it doesn’t bear cherries, have you?”
Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
“Why should we ever go abroad, even across the way, to ask a neighbor’s advice? There is a nearer neighbor within us incessantly telling us how we should behave. But we wait for the neighbor without to tell us of some false, easier way.”
Henry David Thoreau, Letter (1854)
“All the mistakes I make arise from forsaking my own station and trying to see the object from another person’s point of view.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals
“It is possible to be a sage in some things and a child in others, to be at once ferocious, serene and irritable.”
Walter Lippman, A Preface to Morals
Avant-Garde
“Many of those who were ahead of their time had to wait for it in not too comfortable quarters.”
Stanislaw J. Lec, Unkempt Thoughts (1962)