Although images of perfection in people's personal lives can cause unhappiness, images of perfect societies - utopian images - can cause monstrous evil. In fact, forcefully changing society to conform to societal images was the greatest cause of evil in the twentieth century.
But for everyone, I think, there is always a pressure to conform, and I guess as you get older you realize it's less interesting to do that. It starts with you, though, saying, 'I know what I like doing and that's what I'm going to do.'
The first five albums I did, I tried a little bit of everything. I was trying not to conform at all.
Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.
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.
When I conform to truth, I do not conform to an abstract principle; I conform to the nature of God.
There are all these languages that keep people in place that conform us to a set of terms. It's why I think the whole idea of identity as something that is something of a straitjacket. That most of us like to think of as natural and innate. That we just find and go, 'Yeah, that's who I am.'
The aim of every authentic artist is not to conform to the history of art, but to release himself from it in order to replace it with his own history.
I think that women out there should just be happy with how they look, and they shouldn't really try to conform to any stereotype. Just be happy and, hopefully, healthy.
Why does your mind conform? Have you ever asked? Are you aware that you are conforming to a pattern? It doesn't matter what that pattern is, whether you have established a pattern for yourself or it has been established for you.
I was a brownie for a day. My mom made me stop. She didn't want me to conform.
I thought for a very long time that I had to conform or maybe change the way I look, or maybe the hijab was dimming my beauty. I took a moment, and then I realized, you know what, there's a lot of girls who do wear this, and this is their reality. It just made me even more prouder to wear it.
It is true that the politician, in his professional character, does not always, or even very often, conform to the most approved pattern of private conduct.
Its funny, because for females in general - not just in music, but the corporate ladder as well - anything we do has always been harder for us. When it comes to music, the industry wants you to conform, to look like this and to sound like this and do this or that. It makes it harder. It's harder for us to come out and be bosses and lead the pack.
I did not try to conform to anybody's ideal of what a Latin celebrity or movie star should be. I took a lot of hits for it.
Men are recognizing that they have been forced to conform to a very narrow and rather two-dimensional picture of maleness and manhood that they have never had the freedom to question.
If ergonomists have their way, future products won't be built for some hypothetical average person but will conform to the biomechanical needs of whatever particular human body happens to come into contact with them.
Am I coasting on some early success? Yeah. It was a good lucky break for me. But I would rather earn my way back again than simply conform to what people are expecting.
This is the devilish thing about foreign affairs: they are foreign and will not always conform to our whim.
You're made aware of what the industry is and what you need to conform to; I don't fit that, and I'm never going to.
I started writing in the '90s, so I was free to just have an eccentric career and not conform to some idea of what a black writer has to do. I didn't have the burden of representation.
Popular kids don't necessarily know who they are because they're so busy trying to conform. It's the outcasts who are more attuned to who they are. They're more self-aware, more real.
Once you have a Down's syndrome child, you can't conform. In a way, you're free.
I wouldn't even have braces on my teeth. I think they are horrible and this idea that everyone should conform and be perfect is ridiculous.
I'm not going to conform to some consumer need.
If you have your own agenda and your own style and you don't easily conform to what the masses are doing, you're looked upon as being difficult. Whereas, I think of it as just being an individual.
I think the thing that you've seen with Donald Trump is that he doesn't - he doesn't look to the past and say, 'I've got to conform to these precedents.'
I certainly relish the chance to play a woman who didn't have to conform in any way ever to expected behavior or desirable behavior or attractive behavior.
We are more likely to cheat if we see others doing so. We tend to conform to accepted norms of reasonable behaviour, rather than adhere to strict rules.
I just know that I'm innovative. I'm a quick thinker... In Washington, I just want to be a senator who finds a way to drive change and not figure out a way to conform.
I'm really happy to be me, and I'd like to think people like me more because I'm happy with myself and not because I refuse to conform to anything.
Salvation lies in imitating Christ, in other words, in imitating the 'withdrawal relationship' that links him with his Father... To listen to the Father's silence is to abandon oneself to his withdrawal, to conform to it.