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.
Dennis Prager

Banks properly established and conducted are highly useful to the business of the country, and will doubtless continue to exist in the States so long as they conform to their laws and are found to be safe and beneficial.
Martin Van Buren

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.
Felix Bloch

I cannot make the universe obey me. I cannot make other people conform to my own whims and fancies. I cannot make even my own body obey me.
Thomas Merton

I think a lot of people have lost respect for the individual, you know, the individual, the person who doesn't conform.
Erykah Badu

I was a brownie for a day. My mom made me stop. She didn't want me to conform.
Sandra Bullock

I'd just like to inspire people to be themselves and do what they want and not conform to the rigid guidelines of the music or entertainment business.
Juliana Hatfield

I'm not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I've always been a freak. So I've been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I'm one of those people.
John Lennon

If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist, it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity.
Bill Vaughan

It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we're alive - to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

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.
Frederick Scott Oliver

Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.
Bertrand Russell

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.
Andrew Cohen

Men cannot make Scripture conform to their lifestyle; they must make their lifestyle conform to Scripture.
Edwin Louis Cole

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.
Virginia Woolf

Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.
Michel de Montaigne

Pop music allows you to be who you are without having to wear a social uniform or to conform, which some people find impossible to do.
Siobhan Fahey

Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
Gustave Flaubert

Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear. There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law.
Claude Debussy

Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture.
David Bohm