Refuse To Conform Quotes

You’ll learn, as you get older, that rules are made to be broken. Be bold enough to live life on your terms, and never, ever apologize for it. Go against the grain, refuse to conform, take the road less traveled instead of the well-beaten path. Laugh in the face of adversity, and leap before you look. Dance as though EVERYBODY is watching. March to the beat of your own drummer. And stubbornly refuse to fit in.

In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.

Accepting the facts is always tough, so we search for forgiveness to this universe everyday to break the shackles, hurt is a prison and I from a very young young age refused to be held prisoner or even conform.

The key to such power is ambiguity. In a society where the roles everyone plays are obvious, the refusal to conform to any standard will excite interest. Be both masculine and feminine, impudent and charming, subtle and outrageous. Let other people worry about being socially acceptable; those types are a dime a dozen, and you are after a power greater than they can imagine.

Periods' are largely an invention of the historians. The poets themselves are not conscious of living in any period and refuse to conform to the scheme.

There is, however, hope for any person who wants to remain an individual. He can assert himself and refuse to conform. He'll be on his own, that's true, but while he will not have the security enjoyed by those who do conform, there will be no limits to what he may achieve.

If, living in the world, you refuse to be a part of it, you will help others out of this chaos - not in the future, not tomorrow, but now.

If, living in the world, you refuse to be a part of it, you will help other out of this chaos - not in the future, not tomorrow, but now.

I'm a young woman who subverts the conventionally accepted gender paradigm because I refuse to conform.

The simplistic way of not conforming is to see what is in style in our culture and then do the opposite. If short hair is in vogue, the nonconformist wears long hair. If going to the movies is popular, then Christians avoid movies as “worldly.” The extreme case of this may be seen in groups that refuse to wear buttons or use electricity because such things, too, are worldly. A superficial style of nonconformity is the classical pharisaical trap. The kingdom of God is not about buttons, movies, or dancing. The concern of God is not focused on what we eat or what we drink. The call of nonconformity is a call to a deeper level of righteousness, that goes beyond externals. When piety is defined exclusively in terms of externals, the whole point of the apostle’s teaching has been lost. Somehow we have failed to hear Jesus’ words that it is not what goes into a person’s mouth that deflies a person, but what comes out of that mouth. We still want to make the kingdom a matter of eating and drinking.

What never fails inside the mind of an intellectual never works outside the confines of his head. The world’s stubborn refusal to vindicate the intellectual’s theories serves as proof of humanity’s irrationality, not his own. Thus, the true believer retrenches rather than rethinks; he launches a war on the world, denying reality because it fails to conform to his theories. If intellectuals are not prepared to reconcile theory and practice, then why do they bother to venture outside the ivory tower or the coffeehouse? Why not stay in the world of abstractions and fantasy?

So if we are to create a world where all Autistic people of all backgrounds are able to unmask, we have to remove the systems of power that might violently punish those who fail or refuse to conform.

Pirates are daring, adventurous, and willing to set forth into uncharted territories with no guarantee of success. They reject the status quo and refuse to conform to any society that stifles creativity and independence. They are entrepreneurs who take risks and are willing to travel to the ends of the earth for that which they value.

My Venus is damaged, or in exile, that’s what you say of a Planet that can’t be found in the sign where it should be. What’s more, Pluto is in a negative aspect to Venus, and in my case Pluto rules the Ascendant. The result of this situation is that I have, as I see it, Lazy Venus syndrome. That’s what I call this Conformity. In this case we’re dealing with a Person whom fortune has gifted generously, but who has entirely failed to use their potential. Such People are bright and intelligent, but don’t apply themselves to their studies, and use their intelligence to play card games or patience instead. They have beautiful bodies, but they destroy them through neglect, poison themselves with harmful substances, and ignore doctors and dentists. This Venus induces a strange kind of laziness—lifetime opportunities are missed, because you overslept, because you didn’t feel like going, because you were late, because you were neglectful. It’s a tendency to be sybaritic, to live in a state of mild semiconsciousness, to fritter your life away on petty pleasures, to dislike effort and be devoid of any penchant for competition. Long mornings, unopened letters, things put off for later, abandoned projects. A dislike of any authority and a refusal to submit to it, going your own way in a taciturn, idle manner. You could say such people are of no use at all.

They wanted their girls to be safe. To do what they had to do to conform, to defer, to survive, to grow up. They wanted their girls never to grow up. Never to stop burning. They wanted their girls to say fuck it, to see through the lies, to know their own strength. They wanted their girls to believe the things could be different this time, and they wanted it to be true. They wondered, sometimes, if they'd made a mistake. If it was dangerous, taming the wild, stealing away the words a girl might use to name her secret self. They wondered at the consequences of teaching a girl she was weak instead of warning her she was strong. They wondered, if knowing was power, what happened to power that refused to know itself; they wondered what happened that couldn't be satisfied, to pain that couldn't be felt, a rage that couldn't be spoken.

if the natives refuse to conform themselves to their laws they drive them out of those bounds which they mark out for themselves, and use force if they resist, for they account it a very just cause of war for a nation to hinder others from possessing a part of that soil of which they make no use, but which is suffered to lie idle and uncultivated, since every man has, by the law of nature, a right to such a waste portion of the earth as is necessary for his subsistence. 

So much for my great vendetta, so much for the tireless hunt for my betrayer. Isn't this how life turns out, more often than not? It refuses to conform to your needs - the narrative needs that you feel are essential to give rough shape to your time on this earth.

They want you to use a black umbrella; use yellow, use red, use green and always refuse the thing they want you to use! Refusal is often more honourable than conformity!

refused to compromise who I was to conform to their unwritten rules.

In this world where value is unknown, but the price of anything is marked, where the creation of self has been abandoned for the search for self, the behavior diagnosed as antisocial is often too quickly ascribed to intelligence when thrust into contact with widespread conformity, and refuses.

It is often asked, “How could the early disciples turn the world upside down when millions of Christians can’t even keep it right side up today?” The answer is they didn’t conform their faith to match the world. They had the truth, and they refused to water it down. They had a faith that would not compromise.

The corollary of the power of social pressure to conform within a group is that when just one person refuses to go along and presents another view, others then are able to move away from the initial group pressure.

Part of what attracts us to artists is their otherness, their refusal to conform, their big middle finger stuck up in the face of Society, such that their very a- or immorality is what makes their art artistic rather than academic.

Health, in name and in action, has always existed to abuse, to dominate, and to subjugate. The medical industry, the health care industry, and the diet industry all exist to maintain a culture intended to “discipline” those whose bodies refuse to—and, for many, simply cannot—conform to the standards of health.

Those who refuse His mercy satisfy His justice in another way. Without His mercy, they cannot love Him. Without love for Him they cannot be 'justified' or 'made just'. That is to say: they cannot conform to Him Who is love. Those who have not received His mercy are in a state of injustice with regard to Him. It is their own injustice that is condemned by His justice. And in what does their injustice consist? In the refusal of His mercy. We come, in the end, to this basic paradox: that we owe it to God to receive from Him the mercy that is offered to us in Christ, and that to refuse this mercy is the summation of our 'injustice'. Clearly, then, only the mercy of God can make us just, in this supernatural sense, since the primary demand of God's justice upon us is that we receive His mercy.

We perceive the world in a particular way and confidently expect it to conform to its appearance. But we fail to recognize that certain aspects of the 'reality' that appear to us are nothing but figments of our own imagination. In this confusion a conflict ensues between the world as it is and the world as we believe it to be. And the more we insist on our infallibility, the more frustrated we become as the actual world again and again stubbornly refuses to live up to our expectations.

Her legacy is that of a woman who refused to conform to the misogynistic traditions of her time.

Fat” is just the current catchall word for all the things that we as a culture are afraid of: women’s rights, people refusing to acquiesce to cultural pressures of conformity, fear of mortality. [People who hate fat people] see body love as a move toward people taking charge of their lives and choosing what they want to do, no matter what the culture says. This is really scary to a lot of people. The anger they express is actually toward themselves. A person who hates seeing a happy, liberated person wishes they had the strength to do that, but they are too entrenched or “bought in” to the way things are right now to see it as a beautiful thing. So they see it and they hate it . . . People have invested a lot of time and a lot of resources into this game that says “thin wins.” So when people see exceptions to that rule, they feel personally invalidated, personally stolen from, personally affronted.

Isn't this how life turns out, more often than not? It refuses to conform to your needs – the narrative needs that you feel are essential to give rough shape to your time on this earth.

I have not yet been able to stereotype my theological views, and have ceased to expect ever to do so. The idea is preposterous. None but an omniscient mind can continue to maintain a precise identity of views and opinions. Finite minds, unless they are asleep or stultified by prejudice, must advance in knowledge. The discovery of new truth will modify old views and opinions, and there is perhaps no end to this process with finite minds in any world. True Christian consistency does not consist in stereotyping our opinions and views, and in refusing to make any improvement lest we should be guilty of change, but it consists in holding our minds open to receive the rays of truth from every quarter and in changing our views and language and practice as often and as fast, as we can obtain further information. I call this Christian consistency, because this course alone accords with a Christian profession. A Christian profession implies the profession of candour and of a disposition to know and obey all truth. It must follow, that Christian consistency implies continued investigation and change of views and practice corresponding with increasing knowledge. No Christian, therefore, and no theologian should be afraid to change his views, his language, or his practices in conformity with increasing light. The prevalence of such a fear would keep the world, at best, at a perpetual stand-still, on all subjects of science, and consequently all improvements would be precluded.

Aboard the Willful Child 'Well done, everyone,' said Hadrian as he stepped down from the displacement pad, 'you all survived a harrowing voyage down to Ancient Earth in the time period known to historians as the Age of Frothing Hate, where almost everyone acted like stupid little children having temper tantrums because reality refused to conform to their deluded beliefs.

The very essence of Australia is our lack of sophistication–our refusal to conform to pretension and superficiality. We ought to be upholding our ‘fair-dinkumness’ and all the qualities so well documented in our folklore, the non-conformity of the swagman in Waltzing Matilda whose down to earth motto would I’m sure, have been ‘I’d rather be ignorant and fair dinkum than sophisticated and false’. Of course life has been a fight against ignorance, but the danger has always been that gaining knowledge rarely occurs without an increase in sophistication or falseness.

I don't think the point is: Why are we different? Why have we refused to walk one of two narrow paths, but instead demanded the right to blaze our own? The question is not why we were unwilling to conform even when being beaten to the ground by ridicule and brutality. The real burning question is: How did we ever find the courage? From what underground spring did we draw our pride? How did each of us make our way in life, without a single familiar star in the night sky to guide us, to this room where we have at last found others like ourselves? And after so much of ourselves has been injured, or left behind as expendable ballast, many of us worry "What do we have left to give each other? Upon what basis will we build something lasting between us?" I think we have a whole world to give back to each other.

Telling women’s stories was—and would always be—Jackson’s major fictional project. As she had in The Road Through the Wall and the stories of The Lottery, with Hangsaman Jackson continued to chronicle the lives of women whose behavior does not conform to society’s expectations. Neither an obedient daughter nor a docile wife-in-training, Natalie represents every girl who does not quite fit in, who refuses to play the role that has been predetermined for her—and the tragic psychic consequences she suffers as a result. During the postwar years, Betty Friedan would later write, the image of the American woman “suffered a schizophrenic split” between the feminine housewife and the career woman: “The new feminine morality story is . . . the heroine’s victory over Mephistopheles . . . the devil inside the heroine herself.” That is precisely what happens in Hangsaman. Unfortunately, it was a story that the American public, in the process of adjusting to the changing roles of women and the family in the wake of World War II, was not yet ready to countenance.

I refuse to have my vagina photographed because I have no interest in being desired on the basis of its appearance. It has taken me decades to appreciate its power and beauty, and not merely because it birthed a child. Responsive to tenderness and the source of a luminous ecstasy, my vagina has enabled me to transcend an otherwise limited sense of self. I feel no need to make it conform to another’s aesthetic or have it applauded by strangers.

The report made a science fiction-like case that the president was within his constitutional rights to reinterpret congressional legislation to conform more closely to his own desires, or to simply refuse to carry out laws with which he did not agree, or that, the report harrumphed, “unconstitutionally encroach on the executive branch.” In sum, anything the president doesn’t want to do he doesn’t have to do; anything he wants to do, consider it done.

Don’t waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people—unless it affects the common good. It will keep you from doing anything useful. You’ll be too preoccupied with what so-and-so is doing, and why, and what they’re saying, and what they’re thinking, and what they’re up to, and all the other things that throw you off and keep you from focusing on your own mind. You need to avoid certain things in your train of thought: everything random, everything irrelevant. And certainly everything self-important or malicious. You need to get used to winnowing your thoughts, so that if someone says, “What are you thinking about?” you can respond at once (and truthfully) that you are thinking this or thinking that. And it would be obvious at once from your answer that your thoughts were straightforward and considerate ones—the thoughts of an unselfish person, one unconcerned with pleasure and with sensual indulgence generally, with squabbling, with slander and envy, or anything else you’d be ashamed to be caught thinking. Someone like that—someone who refuses to put off joining the elect—is a kind of priest, a servant of the gods, in touch with what is within him and what keeps a person undefiled by pleasures, invulnerable to any pain, untouched by arrogance, unaffected by meanness, an athlete in the greatest of all contests—the struggle not to be overwhelmed by anything that happens. With what leaves us dyed indelibly by justice, welcoming wholeheartedly whatever comes—whatever we’re assigned—not worrying too often, or with any selfish motive, about what other people say. Or do, or think. He does only what is his to do, and considers constantly what the world has in store for him—doing his best, and trusting that all is for the best. For we carry our fate with us—and it carries us. He keeps in mind that all rational things are related, and that to care for all human beings is part of being human. Which doesn’t mean we have to share their opinions. We should listen only to those whose lives conform to nature. And the others? He bears in mind what sort of people they are—both at home and abroad, by night as well as day—and who they spend their time with. And he cares nothing for their praise—men who can’t even meet their own standards.

These individuals, according to Jung, are not ill because they lack the ability to live like everyone else, they are ill “because [they have] not yet found a new form for [their] finest aspirations.” (Carl Jung) Instead of following the well-worn path of conformity such people: “…are born and destined rather to be bearers of new cultural ideals. They are neurotic as long as they bow down before authority and refuse the freedom to which they are destined.” Carl Jung, Some Crucial Points in Psychoanalysis

Utopianism substitutes glorious predictions and unachievable promises for knowledge, science, and reason, while laying claim to them all. Yet there is nothing new in deception disguised as hope and nothing original in abstraction framed as progress. A heavenly society is said to be within reach if only the individual surrenders more of his liberty and being for the general good, meaning the good as prescribed by the state. If he refuses, he will be tormented and ultimately coerced into compliance, for conformity is essential.

It would mean,” he told the editor of the New York World, “that we would lose our heads along with the rest and stop weighing right and wrong. It would mean that a majority of people in this hemisphere would go war mad, quit thinking, and devote their energies to destruction . . . Conformity will be the only virtue. And every man who refuses to conform will have to pay the penalty . . . Once lead this people into war and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance . . . If there is any alternative for God’s sake let’s take it.

I realize that I will always find respite amongst the migrants, the refugees, the expatriates, the homeless, the pirates. I will always be the fence-sitter. I will pass as I see fit and fail to pass when I was really hoping I would and refuse to pass when it serves my purposes.

...Life is filled with unconforities—revealing holes in time that are also fissures in feeling, knowledge, and understanding; holes that relentlessly draw in human investigation and imagination yet refuse to conform, heal, or submit to explanation in ways we might desire or think we need. Sometimes the gaps are too wide, the people, the animals, the objects, the worlds too gone, the time too much for the little time we have. Adrift on a sleepless night, it can feel vertiginous, an abyss of infinity. But then I leave my apartment and head down the packed morning subway and rattle along below Broadway crammed between all these New York bodies, all this human warmth and possibility, this intimate, reassuring connection to the city and the planet and to everything and all of us passing through.

Future historians, I hope, will consider the American fast food industry a relic of the twentieth century — a set of attitudes, systems, and beliefs that emerged from postwar southern California, that embodied its limitless faith in technology, that quickly spread across the globe, flourished briefly, and then receded, once its true costs became clear and its thinking became obsolete. We cannot ignore the meaning of mad cow. It is one more warning about unintended consequences, about human arrogance and the blind worship of science.The same mindset that would add 4-methylacetophenone and solvent to your milkshake would also feed pigs to cows. Whatever replaces the fast food industry should be regional, diverse, authentic, unpredictable, sustainable, profitable — and humble. It should know its limits. People can be fed without being fattened or deceived.This new century may bring an impatience with conformity, a refusal to be kept in the dark, less greed, more compassion, less speed, more common sense, a sense of humor about brand essences and loyalties, a view of food as more than just fuel.Things don’t have to be the way they are. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I remain optimistic.

She doubted not that in time she would grow as indifferent as others to these matters; but there was a softness within her which made it difficult for her. She must conform. She must be like those who lived about her. But for the time being she would refuse to think of the cruel things which could happen to men and women, merely because they spoke too freely. She wanted to be happy; therefore she would not think of anything that might make her otherwise. She

(Inevitably, someone raises the question about World War II: What if Christians had refused to fight against Hitler? My answer is a counterquestion: What if the Christians in Germany had emphatically refused to fight for Hitler, refused to carry out the murders in concentration camps?) The long history of Christian “just wars” has wrought suffering past all telling, and there is no end in sight. As Yoder has suggested, Niebuhr’s own insight about the “irony of history” ought to lead us to recognize the inadequacy of our reason to shape a world that tends toward justice through violence. Might it be that reason and sad experience could disabuse us of the hope that we can approximate God’s justice through killing? According to the guideline I have proposed, reason must be healed and taught by Scripture, and our experience must be transformed by the renewing of our minds in conformity with the mind of Christ. Only thus can our warring madness be overcome. This would mean, practically speaking, that Christians would have to relinquish positions of power and influence insofar as the exercise of such positions becomes incompatible with the teaching and example of Jesus. This might well mean, as Hauerwas has perceived, that the church would assume a peripheral status in our culture, which is deeply committed to the necessity and glory of violence. The task of the church then would be to tell an alternative story, to train disciples in the disciplines necessary to resist the seductions of violence, to offer an alternative home for those who will not worship the Beast. If the church is to be a Scripture-shaped community, it will find itself reshaped continually into a closer resemblance to the socially marginal status of Matthew’s nonviolent countercultural community. To articulate such a theological vision for the church at the end of the twentieth century may be indeed to take most seriously what experience is telling us: the secular polis has no tolerance for explicitly Christian witness and norms. It is increasingly the case in Western culture that Christians can participate in public governance only insofar as they suppress their explicitly Christian motivations. Paradoxically, the Christian community might have more impact upon the world if it were less concerned about appearing reasonable in the eyes of the world and more concerned about faithfully embodying the New Testament’s teaching against violence. Let it be said clearly, however, that the reasons for choosing Jesus’ way of peacemaking are not prudential. In calculable terms, this way is sheer folly. Why do we choose the way of nonviolent love of enemies? If our reasons for that choice are shaped by the New Testament, we are motivated not by the sheer horror of war, not by the desire for saving our own skins and the skins of our children (if we are trying to save our skins, pacifism is a very poor strategy), not by some general feeling of reverence for human life, not by the naive hope that all people are really nice and will be friendly if we are friendly first. No, if our reasons for choosing nonviolence are shaped by the New Testament witness, we act in simple obedience to the God who willed that his own Son should give himself up to death on a cross. We make this choice in the hope and anticipation that God’s love will finally prevail through the way of the cross, despite our inability to see how this is possible. That is the life of discipleship to which the New Testament repeatedly calls us. When the church as a community is faithful to that calling, it prefigures the peaceable kingdom of God in a world wracked by violence.

We must be vigilant in a world which has moved so far from that which is spiritual. It is essential that we reject anything that does not conform to our standards, refusing in the process to surrender that which we desire most: eternal life in the kingdom of God. The storms will still beat at our doors from time to time, for they are an inescapable part of our existence in mortality. We, however, will be far better equipped to deal with them, to learn from them, and to overcome them if we have the gospel at our core and the love of the Savior in our hearts.

He would have denied it, even to himself -deemed it a laughable affectation- but it seemed to him now that he had always secretly believed that in the way he lived (he refused to say his "lifestyle"), in his freelance, un-health-insured, sparsely thinged life, he was in a small way registering a rejection-of conformity, of middle-class convention, of not just acquisitiveness but enslavement to the idol of "security." Nevertheless, he'd wound up in the same place as everyone else. Was this - latte liberalism - his inescapable fate? Surely it was. It was sheer vanity to pretend otherwise.

Though under great pressure to conform to a culture of brutality, a few guards refused to participate in the violence. In one incident, a captive was clubbed so savagely that he was certain he was going to be killed. In the middle of the assault, the attacking guard was called away, and a guard knows as Hirose was ordered to finish the beating. Out of sight of other guards, Hirose told the captive to cry out as if he were being struck, then pounded his club harmlessly against the floor. The two acted out their parts until it seemed enough "beating" had been done. The captive believed that Hirose may have saved his life.

In this world nothing is in its place, beginning with the world itself. We must therefore not be surprised by the spectacle of human injustice. It is equally futile to refuse or to accept the social order: we must endure its changes for the better or the worse with a despairing conformism, as we endure birth, love, the weather, and death. Decomposition presides over the laws of life: closer to our dust than inanimate objects to theirs, we succumb before them and rush upon our destiny under the gaze of the apparently indestructible stars. But they themselves will crumble in a universe which only our heart takes seriously, later expiating its lack of irony by terrible lacerations…

Values constitute your personal “bottom line.” They serve as guides to action. They inform the priorities you set and the decisions you make. They tell you when to say yes and when to say no. They also help you explain the choices you make and why you made them. If you believe, for instance, that diversity enriches innovation and service, then you should know what to do if people with differing views keep getting cut off when they offer fresh ideas. If you value collaboration over individualistic achievement, then you’ll know what to do when your best salesperson skips team meetings and refuses to share information with colleagues. If you value independence and initiative over conformity and obedience, you’ll be more likely to challenge something your manager says if you think it’s wrong.

As it turns out, queer villains become far more interesting among other gay characters, both within a specific project or universe and the zeitgeist at large. They become one star in a larger constellation; they are put in context. And that’s pretty exciting, even liberating; by expanding representation, we give space to queers to be—as characters, as real people—human beings. They don’t have to be metaphors for wickedness and depravity or icons of conformity and docility.11 They can be what they are. We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity. That is to say, queers—real-life ones—do not deserve representation, protection, and rights because they are morally pure or upright as a people.12 They deserve those things because they are human beings, and that is enough.

Do you ever feel like you are giving far fewer fucks and yet still caring so much it sometimes feels like there is only the most tissue-thin layer separating your soul from this world? Like your heart may be broken but your spirit is still rising? Are you refusing to conform and somehow still fitting just right? Able to look people right in the eye without apology and also like you’re a teenager again, bashful and blushing and off-kilter, like that moment when lips unexpectedly pressed against your head and face buried in your hair fingers trailed down y our arm, the way your stomach can flip-flop like that, even now. Do you ever walk on purpose even when you have nowhere to go? Do you notice things deeply, like dark red lipstick prints on pristine white coffee mugs? Like the way whiskey burns and cool white sheets feel against your skin at the end of the day? Are you claiming your identity, clear and strong and true, and also sinking into the vast unknowable mystery of your all? Do your days feel like longing and acquiescence and learning to stop grasping at things that are ready to leave or that choose not to come closer? Are you making a home of your own skin and inviting the world inside? Are you learning that cultivating solid boundaries and driving into a wide open horizon both feel like freedom, like the harsh desert mountains and the soft ocean wisdom and the road to healing that joins the two? Does it all feels like solidity, like truth, like forgiveness and recklessness and heat and sexy and holy, all rolled up together? Do you crave the burn of heat from another and the for nothing to be louder than sound of your own heartbeat, all at once? Do you finally know that you can choose a love and a life that does not break you? That you can claim a softer beauty and a kinder want. That even your animal hunger can soften its rough edges and say a full-throated yes to what is good and kind and holy. Do you remember that insanity is not a prerequisite for passion and that there is another pathway to your art, one that does not demand your pain as payment for its own becoming? Are you learning to show up? To take up space? To feel the power? Is it full of contradiction, does it feel like fire underwater, are you rising to sing?

Ascending from contents to the act, then, one can discern a man’s intention to eclipse reality. This intention can become manifest in a large variety of forms, ranging from the straight lie concerning a fact to the subtler lie of arranging a context in such a manner that the omission of the fact will not be noticed; or from the construction of a system that, by its form, suggests its partial view as the whole of reality to its author’s refusal to discuss the premises of the system in terms of reality experienced. Beyond the act, finally, we reach the actor, that is the man who has committed the act of deforming his humanity to a self and now lets the shrunken self eclipse his own full reality. He will deny his humanity and insist he is nothing but his shrunken self; he wiU deny ever having experienced the reality of common experience; he will deny that anybody could have a fuller perception of reality than he allows his self; in brief, he will set the contracted self as a model for himself as well as for everybody else. Moreover, his insistence on conformity wiU be aggressive - and in this aggressiveness there betrays itself the anxiety and alienation of the man who has lost contact with reality.

O my God! how much I long to be the missionary of Your holy will, and to teach all men that there is nothing more easy, more attainable, more within reach, and in the power of everyone, than sanctity. How I wish that I could make them understand that just as the good and the bad thief had the same things to do and to suffer; so also two persons, one of whom is worldly and the other leading an interior and wholly spiritual life have, neither of them, anything different to do or to suffer; but that one is sanctified and attains eternal happiness by submission to Your holy will in those very things by which the other is damned because he does them to please himself, or endures them with reluctance and rebellion. This proves that it is only the heart that is different. Oh! all you that read this, it will cost you no more than to do what you are doing, to suffer what you are suffering, only act and suffer in a holy manner. It is the heart that must be changed. When I say heart, I mean will. Sanctity, then, consists in willing all that God wills for us. Yes! sanctity of heart is a simple “fiat,” a conformity of will with the will of God. What could be more easy, and who could refuse to love a will so kind and so good? Let us love it then, and this love alone will make everything in us divine.

Now, in the academy, you cannot just say anything about male theory. You have to proceed with an immanent critique, that is to say, you have to expertly play the parts against the whole. You show, for example, how certain assumptions in the work actually defeat its stated purpose of human liberation, but once remedied, i.e. salvaged, the theory will work for women. An immanent critique can stay within the masculinist academic circle. In this position women become the technicians of male theory who have to reprogram the machine, turning it from a war machine against women into a gentler, kinder war machine, killing us softly. This is a very involving task and after years of playing this part it is understandable that there may be little desire to admit that the effort was virtually futile. An investment has been made, and the conformity is not wholly outer. What attitudes and feelings does this sexist context produce towards oppositional women who refuse this male material? Does a male-circled woman have the power and security to be generous? Having compromised her freedom, will she be less willing to compromise ours? Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of this arrangement, besides the ways it sets women against one another, is the fact that although the male academy values owning our freedom, it does not have to pay a lot for it. Masculine culture already controls gross amounts of female lives. Still, it seems to want more, but always at the same low price. The exploited are very affordable.

Let people misunderstand you. Let them tell their stories, create their labels, and see only the fragments of you they are willing or able to perceive. Let them twist your truth, define you by your flaws, or confine you to the narrow roles they’ve crafted in their minds. It is their narrative, not yours. Let them be. You do not need to explain yourself to those who are determined not to see you. You owe no defense of your heart, your choices, or your journey to anyone unwilling to step beyond their assumptions. Even if you handed them the whole of your truth, many would refuse to accept it. Their view of you is often a reflection of their own fears, limitations, or insecurities, not of your reality. So let them be. Instead of chasing their understanding, turn inward. Anchor yourself so deeply in your own authenticity that no distortion can unmoor you. Learn to validate your worth through your own eyes, not through the fleeting approval of others. Let your mistakes become stepping stones, your wounds a guide to deeper wisdom. The more you know and honor yourself, the less the noise around you matters. When you focus on your inner growth, their judgments lose weight. You see clearly that you were never meant to live in their boxes or conform to their expectations. Your life is yours to build, piece by piece, with no need for external validation. In time, you’ll find a quiet strength in this freedom. The world’s misunderstandings will become distant echoes, powerless to shake the foundation of who you are. In that stillness, you’ll discover the resilience and peace that only come from knowing and embracing yourself fully. And when no one else is there to applaud your journey, you’ll realize you never needed them to. Your growth, your becoming, is applause enough.

Creating “Correct” Children in the Classroom One of the most popular discipline programs in American schools is called Assertive Discipline. It teaches teachers to inflict the old “obey or suffer” method of control on students. Here you disguise the threat of punishment by calling it a choice the child is making. As in, “You have a choice, you can either finish your homework or miss the outing this weekend.” Then when the child chooses to try to protect his dignity against this form of terrorism, by refusing to do his homework, you tell him he has chosen his logical, natural consequence of being excluded from the outing. Putting it this way helps the parent or teacher mitigate against the bad feelings and guilt that would otherwise arise to tell the adult that they are operating outside the principles of compassionate relating. This insidious method is even worse than outand-out punishing, where you can at least rebel against your punisher. The use of this mind game teaches the child the false, crazy-making belief that they wanted something bad or painful to happen to them. These programs also have the stated intention of getting the child to be angry with himself for making a poor choice. In this smoke and mirrors game, the children are “causing” everything to happen and the teachers are the puppets of the children’s choices. The only ones who are not taking responsibility for their actions are the adults. Another popular coercive strategy is to use “peer pressure” to create compliance. For instance, a teacher tells her class that if anyone misbehaves then they all won’t get their pizza party. What a great way to turn children against each other. All this is done to help (translation: compel) children to behave themselves. But of course they are not behaving themselves: they are being “behaved” by the adults. Well-meaning teachers and parents try to teach children to be motivated (translation: do boring or aversive stuff without questioning why), responsible (translation: thoughtless conformity to the house rules) people. When surveys are conducted in which fourth-graders are asked what being good means, over 90% answer “being quiet.” And when teachers are asked what happens in a successful classroom, the answer is, “the teacher is able to keep the students on task” (translation: in line, doing what they are told). Consulting firms measuring teacher competence consider this a major criterion of teacher effectiveness. In other words if the students are quietly doing what they were told the teacher is evaluated as good. However my understanding of ‘real learning’ with twenty to forty children is that it is quite naturally a bit noisy and messy. Otherwise children are just playing a nice game of school, based on indoctrination and little integrated retained education. Both punishments and rewards foster a preoccupation with a narrow egocentric self-interest that undermines good values. All little Johnny is thinking about is “How much will you give me if I do X? How can I avoid getting punished if I do Y? What do they want me to do and what happens to me if I don’t do it?” Instead we could teach him to ask, “What kind of person do I want to be and what kind of community do I want to help make?” And Mom is thinking “You didn’t do what I wanted, so now I’m going to make something unpleasant happen to you, for your own good to help you fit into our (dominance/submission based) society.” This contributes to a culture of coercion and prevents a community of compassion. And as we are learning on the global level with our war on terrorism, as you use your energy and resources to punish people you run out of energy and resources to protect people. And even if children look well-behaved, they are not behaving themselves They are being behaved by controlling parents and teachers.

When they discover within themselves the yearning to be free, they perceive that this yearning can be transformed into reality only when the same yearning is aroused in their comrades. But while dominated by the fear of freedom they refuse to appeal to others, or to listen to the appeals of others, or even to the appeals of their own conscience. They prefer gregariousness to authentic comradeship; they prefer the security of conformity with their state of unfreedom to the creative communion produced by freedom and even the very pursuit of freedom.

In a letter written to the play's director, Peter Wood, on 30th March 1958, just before the start of rehearsals, Pinter rightly refused to add extra lines explaining or justifying Stanley's motives in withdrawing from the world into a dingy seaside boarding-house: 'Stanley cannot perceive his only valid justification - which is he is what he is - therefore he certainly can never be articulate about it.' But Pinter came much closer than he usually does to offering an explanation of the finished work: We've agreed: the hierarchy, the Establishment, the arbiters, the socio- religious monsters arrive to affect censure and alteration upon a member of the club who has discarded responsibility (that word again) towards himself and others. (What is your opinion, by the way, of the act of suicide?) He does possess, however, for my money, a certain fibre - he fights for his life. It doesn't last long, this fight. His core being a quagmire of delusion, his mind a tenuous fuse box, he collapses under the weight of their accusation - an accusation compounded of the shit- stained strictures of centuries of 'tradition'. This gets us right to the heart of the matter. It is not simply a play about a pathetic victim brainwashed into social conformity. It is a play about the need to resist, with the utmost vigour, dead ideas and the inherited weight of the past. And if you examine the text, you notice how Pinter has toughened up the original image of the man in the Eastbourne digs with 'nowhere to go'. Pinter's Stanley Webber - a palpably Jewish name, incidentally - is a man who shores up his precarious sense of self through fantasy, bluff, violence and his own manipulative form of power-play. His treatment of Meg initially is rough, playful, teasing: he's an ersatz, scarpegrace Oedipus to her boardinghouse Jocasta. But once she makes the fateful, mood-changing revelation - 'I've got to get things in for the two gentlemen' - he's as dangerous as a cornered animal. He affects a wanton grandeur with his talk of a European concert tour. He projects his own fear on to Meg by terrorising her with stories of nameless men coming to abduct her in a van. In his first solo encounter with McCann, he tries to win him over by appealing to a shared past (Maidenhead, Fuller's tea shop, Boots library) and a borrowed patriotism ('I know Ireland very well. I've many friends there. I love that country and I admire and trust its people... I think their policemen are wonderful'). At the start of the interrogation he resists Goldberg's injunction to sit down and at the end of it he knees him in the stomach. And in the panic of the party, he attempts to strangle Meg and rape Lulu. These are hardly the actions of a supine victim. Even though Stanley is finally carried off shaven, besuited, white-collared and ostensibly tamed, the spirit of resistance is never finally quelled. When asked how he regards the prospect of being able to 'make or break' in the integrated outer world, he does not stay limply silent, but produces the most terrifying noises.

Are we not the clay and God the potter? When he refuses to conform to our wills, do we discard him? If you are looking for a religion centered around yourself, Ben, I must agree that Christianity is a poor choice.

But oh, this is not the end he had imagined for himself as a kid! or even at thirty. To the adolescent boy, dreaming romantically of the gifted tormented men who had thrown their lives away, suicide had been a glamorous thing, a gallant flinging down of the glove, a refusal to submit, to conform, to endure, a demonstration that the spirit with honor is unwilling to go on except in its own way: almost a gesture debonair.

Getting married and trying to conform to societies standards did not work. No one can cut a part of who they are out completely and expect to be successful. It is when I found my creative voice refusing to be silenced that things started moving forward again.

On the Training of Doctors is dedicated to everyone in the world that defies conventions. It is dedicated to those that take the chance to be themselves in a world that demands compliance to norms. We dedicate this book to everyone in the queer, BDSM Lifestyler/kinkster, geek/nerd, neurodivergent, pagan, artistic, writing, transgender communities, and any other community that dares to defy the “norms”. There is nothing that takes more courage than to stand up and be yourself when those around us demand that we conform. We refuse to conform. We refuse to comply. We are beautiful and unique. We are never going to go away, and we are going to change the world.

Brontë was attempting to depict a character that adheres to the unchanging principles of her faith though she refused conformity to the particular practices of her society. Doctrine and practice, unfortunately, don’t always neatly coincide. At this point in the book, Jane—like me, an alien and pilgrim—demonstrates her possession of true freedom: the freedom to be true to the self she knows she has been created to be.

Reflection on Romans 12:1–2 It is increasingly difficult for us to remain unaffected by the values of our society. In an age of unprecedented communication, we receive an extraordinary number of messages reinforcing the world’s value system. But the solution is not to remove ourselves from the world. We are to go into it with a firm understanding of the values of God’s kingdom, refusing to be intimidated or swayed by contrary opinions and prepared for God to use us. In fact, when we’re filled with his Spirit and listening for his voice, we can shape our environment more than it shapes us. Our transformed minds can make an impact. Instead of being conformed to the world, we can become transformers of it.

At last, she seemed to have heard me. Comprehension lit her eyes for the first time in forever. “Dear God . . . you . . . you . . . love that monster.”... You will rue it!” ... “I-I spent eight years in an institution, caged, trapped—for you! But you refuse to hear me. To see.”.... My grandmother might be a murderer for the Arcana cause. And now her player was refusing to conform. .... “You want Death so badly, he’ll end your life. He will take your head; I swear it. And if you’ve truly fallen in love with him, then you deserve it!

Minding less can also serve the greater good. Some people have changed the course of history by stepping up to say the unsayable or do the undoable in later life. Rosa Parks was 42 when she refused to give up her seat on that bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Today we need that willingness to rock the boat and speak truth to power more than ever. Why? Because we live in a world ruled by bullshit and branding, where spin trumps sincerity, where the pressure to perform is relentless, where online echo chambers insulate us from views that contradict our own, where Twitter mobs police opinions, jokes and language, where the keys to the kingdom are handed to those who find the most marketable way of saying what everyone else wants to hear. One remedy for this culture of conformity is to have more people around who are prepared to speak their mind because they mind less what others think of them – and that is exactly what the longevity revolution can deliver. As Oliver James, a prominent British psychologist and psychotherapist, puts it: ‘That bluntness, that refreshing authenticity you find in older people, is hugely to be valued.

8If we say we have no sin [refusing to admit that we are sinners], we delude ourselves and the truth is not in us. [His word does not live in our hearts.] 9If we [freely] admit that we have sinned and confess our sins, He is faithful and just [true to His own nature and promises], and will forgive our sins and cleanse us continually from all unrighteousness [our wrongdoing, everything not in conformity with His will and purpose]. 10If we say that we have not sinned [refusing to admit acts of sin], we make Him [out to be] a liar [by contradicting Him] and His word is not in us.

Some of the most interesting works of ‘Asian American Literature’ thrive in the world of indie publishing and micro presses, where you will find our authors experimenting, prolific, testifying, refusing to conform to any single ‘Asian American’ canonical representation or well-behaved institutional standards.

The danger The thrill The fun in being defiant In not conforming In refusing to get into the narrow structure that is conventional living The thrill and innocence of the calves swimming against the tide The pain of being corrected and forced into the straight and narrow And triumph of not getting caught, Life is a dip The fun is in enjoying it differently

This is not a book I could have imagined writing a dozen years ago. When an older couple from another town attempted to set up and lead a Bible club at my daughter's public elementary school in Southern California in 2009, they might as well have been alien visitors showing up at a beach party. The purpose of the club was to convince children as young as five that they would burn for an eternity if they failed to conform to a strict interpretation of the Christian faith. The club's organizers were offered free and better space in the evangelical church next door to our school, but they refused it; they insisted on holding the club in the public school because they knew the kids would think the message was coming from the school. They referred to our public school as their "mission field" and our children as "the harvest." ... As I researched the group behind these kindergarten missionaries, I saw that they were part of a national network of clubs. I soon discovered that this network was itself just one of many initiatives to insert reactionary religion into public schools across the country. Then I realized that these initiatives were the fruit of a nationally coordinated effort not merely to convert other people's children in the classroom but to undermine public education altogether. Belatedly, I understood that the conflict they provoked in our local community- -I was hardly the only parent who found their presence in the public school alarming was not an unintended consequence of their activity. It was of a piece with their plan to destroy confidence in our system of education and make way for a system of religious education more to their liking.

I shrug. “I am me, and I refuse to apologize for it. I don’t conform well, but I also don’t play games. If I have something on my mind, you’ll always know it. I don’t mince words, and I often offend people who prefer social graces and subtext.

In response to the command to enjoy, contemporary cynicism is an effort to gain distance from the functioning of power, to resist the hold that power has over us. Hence, the cynic turns inward and displays an indifference to external authorities, with the aim of self-sufficient independence. Symbolic authority—which would force the subject into a particular symbolic identity, an identity not freely chosen by the subject herself—is the explicit enemy of cynicism. To acknowledge the power of symbolic authority over one’s own subjectivity would be, in the eyes of the cynic, to acknowledge one’s failure to enjoy fully, making such an acknowledgment unacceptable. In the effort to refuse the power of this authority, one must eschew all the trappings of conformity. This is why the great Cynical philosopher Diogenes made a show of masturbating in public, a gesture that made clear to everyone that he had moved beyond the constraints of the symbolic law and that he would brook no barrier to his jouissance. Byfreely doing in public what others feared to do, Diogenes acted out his refusal to submit to the prohibition that others accepted. He attempted to demonstrate that the symbolic law had no absolute hold over him and that he had no investment in it. However, seeming to be beyond the symbolic law and actually being beyond it are two different—and, in fact, opposed—things, and this difference becomes especially important to recognize in the contemporary society of enjoyment. In the act of making a show of one’s indifference to the public law (in the manner of Diogenes and today’s cynical subject), one does not gain distance from that law, but unwittingly reveals one’s investment in it. Such a show is done for the look of the symbolic authority. The cynic stages her/his act publicly in order that symbolic authority will see it. Because it is staged in this way, we know that the cynic’s act—such as the public masturbation of Diogenes—represents a case of acting-out, rather than an authentic act, an act that suspends the functioning of symbolic authority. Acting-out always occurs on a stage, while the authentic act and authentic enjoyment—the radical break from the constraints of symbolic authority—occur unstaged, without reference to the Other’s look. 9 In the History of Philosophy, Hegel makes clear the cynic’s investment in symbolic authority through his discussion of Plato’s interactions with Diogenes: In Plato’s house [Diogenes] once walked on the beautiful carpets with muddy feet, saying, “I tread on the pride of Plato.” “Yes, but with another pride,” replied Plato, as pointedly. When Diogenes stood wet through with rain, and the bystanders pitied him, Plato said, “If you wish to compassionate him, just go away. His vanity is in showing himself off and exciting surprise; it is what made him act in this way, and the reason would not exist if he were left alone. Though Diogenes attempts to act in a way that demonstrates his self-sufficiency, his distance from every external authority, what he attains, however, is far from self-sufficiency. As Plato’s ripostes demonstrate, everything that the cynic does to distance himself from symbolic authority plays directly into the hands of that authority. Here we see how cynicism functions symptomatically in the society of enjoyment, providing the illusion of enjoyment beyond social constraints while leaving these constraints completely intact.

No matter what controversy erupts, you'll find that artists just keep doing what artists have been doing since the beginning of time. Pushing the edges. Exploding the margins. Making something so compelling you can't look away even when it disturbs you, even when it awakens something dormant inside your being that threatens the status quo you depend on. We are here to rewire the rules of creation. Here to make work that refuses to be ignored. Writing and singing and dancing our way out of the closets and out of the churches and out of the pyres they built to burn us. It's our job as makers, as writers and singers and painters and dancers and actors and those born to act as mirrors to a world that sought to contain us inside a dogma meant only for the meek and compliant. It's the entire reason, full stop, the ending and the beginning of the story, of every story, Over and over and over again. So, the conservative talking heads, the hellfire and brimstone preachers, the right-wing bible thumpers, and those who have proclaimed themselves the bastions of moral superiority can keep clutching their pearls and beating their breasts. We'll just keep making art that moves you. You're welcome.

Pirates are daring, adventurous, and willing to set forth into uncharted territories with no guarantee of success. They reject the status quo and refuse to conform to any society that stifles creativity and independence. They

Fearing someone is to do the person's will Proverbs 9:10King James Version (KJV) 10 The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding. I remember when we were children, when dad was stepping to the house, everybody was packing what he or she was doing in order to behave normal. Because there was a fear that if dad comes and meet us playing instead of studying, he will just beat us up. Today The world doesn't care about fearing God. Who is also a father to us, even more than a father : our creator. People will send devotional message without even doing what they send, people will dress anyhow, women with trousers when the bible is against it(Deut22,5), women being preachers when the word refuses it, men putting on short on the road side like gays, having strange hair cut and calling it SWAGG, people obeying the church instead of the Word, putting artificial and removing the natural. Why? Because there aren't having fear of anything. But the the true children of God will stay with The Word and only The Word. You who read this message, take heed before it is too late, for Jesus-Christ isn't coming for people who conformed themselves with the world but will rather take those that will be transformed by The Word. Shalom

But what if men refused to trust God’s revelatory truth? What if they began to test His Word, all of it or part of it, by the scrutiny of scientific minds? What if they were to reduce His revelation to just one potential source of truth among many, and presume that God was simply incapable of communicating by an objective Word? What if they were to question the historicity of the Bible, the resurrection, the miracles, the virgin birth, and anything else that threatened a purely naturalist worldview? What if they were to look to the mind of man as the arbiter of all propositional statements? What if they were to demand that God’s Word conform to certain standards for truth as preconceived in their own minds? What if they repudiated all certainty and conviction concerning God’s revelation? What if they were more instructed by personal anecdotes, dreams, prophecies, revelations, and entertainment than by the authoritative words of Christ? What if the church itself splintered into a thousand denominations with a thousand novel interpretations of what they hoped Scripture said? If they did all of these things, we would have to conclude that man had made himself the final measure of truth.

seemed almost certain to the mathematicians that since the general first, second, third, and fourth degree equations can be solved by means of the usual algebraic operations such as addition, subtraction, and roots, then the general fifth degree equation and still higher degree equations could also be solved. For three hundred years this problem was a classic one. Hundreds of mature and expert mathematicians sought the solution, but a little boy found the full answer. The Frenchman Évariste Galois (1811— 1832), who refused to conform to school examinations but worked brilliantly and furiously on his own, showed that general equations of degree higher than the fourth cannot be solved by algebraic operations. To establish this result Galois created the theory of groups, a subject that is now at the base of modern abstract algebra and that transformed algebra from a a series of elementary techniques to a broad, abstract, and basic branch of mathematics.

Il ne faudrait tout de même pas que les musulmans soient insidieusement invités à comprendre que la seule alternative au terrorisme serait de se conformer aux normes antitraditionnelles prônées par l’Occident. Lorsque, sous la menace, les Occidentaux exigent de musulmans qu’ils "reconnaissent l’État d’ Israël et renoncent à la violence", ils formulent une exigence qu’aucun croyant ne peut accepter. Il est faux d’affirmer que ceux qui opèrent cet amalgame ne sont pas hostiles à l’islâm : ils le sont, et il ne leur appartient pas, alors qu’ ils ignorent la religion islamique de manière systématique, de décider ce qui est conforme ou non à la shari‘a, à la loi traditionnelle propre à l’ islâm. Le devoir de tout musulman, et même de tout croyant, est de ne pas reconnaître la profanation inhérente à l’existence de l’État sioniste. Si on lui enjoint de reconnaître ce faux "Israël", en menaçant de l ’affamer s’ il refuse, c’est pour la défense de sa foi qu’ il devient un martyr, au moins en ce sens qu’ il accepte une souffrance pouvant éventuellement le conduire à la mort. On invite les musulmans à renoncer à la violence, tout en utilisant l’ intimidation pour les amener à agir contre leur volonté, c’est-à-dire en leur faisant violence. C’est dans le terme "violence" que réside l’ambiguïté. Il a été ordonné au Prophète Muhammad de "combattre les hommes jusqu’à ce qu’ ils disent : lâ ilâha illa Allâh (il n’y a pas de Divinité si ce n’ est Allâh)". Cet ordre divin concerne évidemment la communauté islamique et justifie le jihâd, la guerre sainte menée pour défendre le Droit d’Allâh et les droits de l’islâm. D’autre part, le Très-Haut a enjoint aux musulmans d’être "des témoins à l’encontre des hommes", c’est-à-dire à l’égard de ceux qui, sans avoir rejoint l’islâm, se réclament d’une révélation divine et d’une norme traditionnelle. C’est en vertu de cette injonction que les musulmans peuvent aujourd'hui interpeller l’Église catholique pour lui rappeler qu’ elle avait le devoir de ne pas reconnaître l’État juif et qu’elle s’est rendue coupable d’une faute, aux conséquences néfastes pour elle, en manquant à ce devoir. Nul ne peut reprocher à l’ islâm de combattre cet État et de mener une guerre sainte contre les égarements de l’Occident moderne. La seule question qui peut se poser est celle des moyens utilisés pour mener ce combat, étant bien entendu que le terrorisme est antitraditionnel par définition et que toute violence implique une brutalité contraire aux "bonnes manières d’agir" (makârim al-akhlâq) qui doivent prévaloir, même dans la manière de combattre et de faire la guerre. Cette question est alors de savoir s’ il est encore possible de mener une guerre vraiment sainte (jihâd) à notre époque où la force est exercée le plus souvent au moyen de la brutalité, de la violence et du terrorisme. L’immense hypocrisie de ceux qui accusent l’islâm d’être terroriste, c’est d’inverser les rapports et de les accuser en fait ... de se comporter comme des Occidentaux, ce qui est bien le comble de la contradiction !

the new creation thrives in an environment of freedom and love and depends on transformation coming from within, not conformity imposed from without. But that takes time and rare is the man, woman, or institution that can long refuse the urge to give people rules to follow instead of help to discover a transformative relationship with a loving Father. The demands of religion and the needs of an institution for conformity are perfectly aligned so as to make the path of human effort virtually irresistible. It can yield quick results externally, while it saps the vitality of the Gospel.

Peter Pan Syndrome" I have peter pan syndrome I refuse to conform I refuse to transform I have peter pan syndrome I have peter pan syndrome Oh don't take away my visions Don't take away my dreams Oh don't take away my visions Don't take away my dreams I am living it up I am living in a dream I am living in a dream I am living it up I am living in a dream I am living in living in a dream I refuse to make kennies I refuse to be teased I refuse to be big I refuse to make us now I refuse to make kennies I refuse to be teased I refuse to be big I refuse to make us no Let's be small Oh let's be verbal I rather be an idiot than me be a crybaby a crybaby, cry, baby, cry, cry crybaby, cry, baby, cry, cry Oh don't take away my visions Don't take away my dreams Oh don't take away my visions Don't take away my dreams I am living it up I am living in a dream I am living in a dream I am living it up I am living in a dream I am living in living in a dream I refuse to grow I refuse to get old I refuse to be serious Oh, I wanna be delirious I have a peter pan syndrome Oh, peter pan syndrome Oh don't take away my visions Don't take away my dreams Oh don't take away my visions Don't take away my dreams Oh don't take away my visions Don't take away my dreams Oh don't take away my visions Don't take away my dreams (Dreams, dreams, dreams, dreams, dreams, dreams) (Dreams, dreams, dreams, dreams, dreams, dreams)

Pirates are daring, adventurous, and willing to set forth into uncharted territories with no guarantee of success. They reject the status quo and refuse to conform to any society that stifles creativity and independence. They are entrepreneurs who take risks and are willing to travel to the ends of the earth for that which they value. Although fiercely independent, they travel with and embrace a diverse crew. If you’re willing to live by the code, commit to the voyage, and pull your share of the load, then you’re free to set sail. Pirates don’t much care about public perception; they proudly fly their flags in defiance. And besides, everybody loves a pirate.

To me, being appropriate does not always mean conforming. Often it means just the opposite. Sometimes, refusing to conform and even confronting is not only appropriate but necessary to change the world for the better.

Wonder is my people attributing the creation of the universe to an act of dismemberment. It is avoiding true mystery through fantasy. And if the universe refuses to conform to your fantasy does it cease to be wonderful That is conceit of the highest order. Nen Yim

God operates in levels. First He changes your life to help you see opportunities, and you can't appreciate it. Then He sends you people that can help you, and you refuse to trust them. Then, He boosts your vitality, so that you might still be able to do something for yourself, but you conform to your lifestyle and habits. Then, He ignores you, until you realize, through your own suffering, that you've offended Him in all these ways.

At the sessions after I was indicted for an upholder and maintainer of unlawful assemblies and conventicles, and for not conforming to the national worship of the church of England; and after some conference there with the justices, they taking my plain dealing with them for a confession, as they termed it, of the indictment, did sentence me to a perpetual banishment, because I refused to conform.  So being again delivered up to the jailer’s hands, I was had home to prison, and there have lain now complete twelve years, waiting to see what God would suffer these men to do with me.

He was often angry at people because they contrarily refused to fit in nicely with his theories. And, of course, it was the people who were wrong. The theories had been advanced by the most Eminent Authorities, and proved by carefully selected case histories. His one satisfaction in life was that so many of the laws he had advocated to make people conform to these theories had been passed-despite strong opposition.

Across the various iterations, the 'real housewives' flaunted their refusal to conform to the happy modern housewife ideal as though they were breaking the law by spending their days drinking, sparring, and shopping. They proudly showed off their incompetence in the kitchen (as when Adrienne of Beverly Hills washed a chicken with hand soap), or their disinterest in sex (as when Lisa Vanderpump joked about treating sex as a twice-annual gift to her husband), or their limited patience for parenthood (like Camille, who gave birth to her kids via a surrogate and employed one nanny per kid). Some, like Camille, made a point of treating their employees like beloved friends and their beloved friends like employees, whereas others, like Larsa Pippen, bragged to friends about their deep-seated nanny hatred and their compulsive need to fire them. Their lives were constantly being exposed as shams in the tabloids as they continued to deconstruct the feminine mystique on-screen and reconstruct it for the New New Gilded Age (Gilded Age III: More for Me). They hawked their lifestyle brands. When wronged, they became pure vessels for sorrow. They fell apart in public and wasted away in plain sight. They suffered exquisitely.

All things considered, it is difficult to see Julius Evola as any kind of fascist at all. … Evola never was any kind of fascist. He was neither a ‘cryptofascist,’ a ‘parafascist,’ a ‘superfascist,’ nor a ‘neofascist.’ He was and always remained an occultist, a pagan ‘magus’. … The fact is that because fascism is considered so reprehensible, Anglo-American academics do not feel themselves obliged to treat the subject with any professional detachment. Cavalier and irresponsible claims can and have been made. … Since Fascism is almost universally held to be an unmitigated evil, no one really expects to be held accountable for their treatment of its ideas. The results are apparent. Very few academics would tolerate similar treatment of Marxist, or Marxist-Leninist, ideas. The consequence is that, more often than not, we are treated to a caricature of Fascist thought. Few academics bother to read the primary literature. That is held to be an unconscionable waste of time, since everyone knows, intuitively, that Fascists never entertained any real ideas. It is a common judgment among many that Marx, Lenin, Mao Zedong, and Fidel Castro had real ideas, but Fascists never did. As a result, we have no idea what to expect of the thought of ‘neofascists.’ As we have suggested, some see ‘neofascism’ in the political thought of Reagan Republicans, tax protesters, soccer thugs, skinheads, graveyard vandals, militia members, antisocialists, anti-egalitarians, and anyone who refuses to conform to the strictures of ‘political correctness.’ The results have been intellectually embarrassing. The nonfascist thought of an occultist such as Evola is conceived fascist, while ideas having unmistakable fascist properties often fail to be so considered. This is nowhere more evident than in the treatment of patterns of thought that are somehow insulated from criticism. In the United States, an abundance of revolutionary political thought is just so insulated. Black protest thought is hardly ever considered in a comparative context. More often than not, it is treated as though it were sui generis, a unique product reflecting incomparable experience. Actually, more fascism is to be found in black protest literature than in all the works of Julius Evola —and yet, one is at a loss to find any of it, or any mention of it, in the anthologies of neofascist reflection

You got in a lot of trouble, didn’t you?” I gather, imagining a younger version of Enzo sneaking out at night, drinking liquor straight from the bottle, and slipping through the windows of blushing girls. The last part makes me a little jealous, but I’m not sure if it’s because I didn’t know him then and he wasn’t slipping through my window, or if it’s because I never got to experience things like that growing up. Kevin never allowed me to have friends. He never allowed me to live. “We did,” he says. “Not as much as I would’ve liked, though.” “It sounds mundane.” He hums, a deep, rumbling sound of amusement. “It was, which is exactly why I acted out. Everything is a sin to Catholicism. I was sexually repressed, but considering I refused to conform, I sure as hell wasn’t going to allow them to take pleasure from me, too. I attended confessions more times than I could count. I asked for forgiveness, but I never really wanted it.” I snort. “I bet the nuns loved you,” I tease. “They hated me,” he says with mirth. “Most of them, anyway.

Many professed Christians have conformed to the world, embracing idolatrous lifestyles that neglect the vulnerable and ignore the biblical mandate to care for the least of these. As the end days approach, many will succumb to deceiving spirits, demonic doctrines, and hypocrisy, leading to a great apostasy. But amidst the chaos and persecution, afflictions and hardships, we must stand firm in our faith, refusing to abandon our trust in Christ. For it is in the darkest moments that our allegiance to Him is tested and proven. Let us hold fast to the anchor of our hope, Jesus Christ, and persevere in His truth, even when all else fails.

In the intoxication of being twenty and swept up by my reading, I hoped to live in the light of day, in joy, refusing submission, shackles and conformity.

In the intoxication of being twenty and swept up by my reading, I hoped to live in the light of day, in joy, refusing submission, shackles and conformity.

An easy and even a pleasant task is it to reduce human problems to numerical figures in black and white on charts and graphs, an infinitely difficult one is it to suggest concrete solutions, or to extend true charity in individual lives. Yet life can only be lived in the individual; almost invariably the individual refuses to conform to the theories and the classifications of the statistician.

Assia, living, and ultimately refusing to conform to the demands he made about the size and shape of her body, the way she spoke and dressed, and the role she played in his life, could not be espaliered.

All forms of orgiastic union have three characteristics: they are intense, even violent; they occur in the total personality, mind and body; they are transitory and periodical. Exactly the opposite holds true for that form of union which is by far the most frequent solution chosen by man in the past and in the present: the union based on conformity with the group, its customs, practices and beliefs. Here again we find a considerable development. In a primitive society the group is small; it consists of those with whom one shares blood and soil. With the growing development of culture, the group enlarges; it becomes the citizenry of a polis the citizenry of a large state, the members of a church. Even the poor Roman felt pride because he could say 'civis romanus sum'; Rome and the empire were his family, his home, his world. Also in con-temporary Western society the union with the group is the prevalent way of overcoming separateness. It is a union in which the individual self disappears to a large extent, and where the aim is to belong to the herd. If i am like everybody else, if i have no feelings or thoughts which make me different, if i conform in custom, dress, ideas, to the pattern of the group, i am saved; saved from the frightening experience of aloneness. The dictatorial systems use threats and terror to induce this conformity; the democratic countries, suggestion and propaganda. There is, indeed, one great difference between the two systems. In the democracies non-conformity is possible and, in fact, by no means entirely absent; in the totalitarian systems, only a few unusual heroes and martyrs can be expected to refuse obedience. But in spite of this difference the democratic societies show an over-whelming degree of conformity. The reason lies in the fact that there has to be an answer to the quest for union, and if there is no other or better way, then the union of herd con-formity becomes the predominant one. One can only understand the power of the fear to be different, the fear to be only a few steps away from the herd, if one understands the depths of the need not to be separated. Sometimes this fear of non-conformity is rationalized as fear of practical dangers which could threaten the non-conformist. But actually, people wantto conform to a much higher degree than they are forced to conform, at least in the Western democracies.

All forms of orgiastic union have three characteristics: they are intense, even violent; they occur in the total personality, mind and body; they are transitory and periodical. Exactly the opposite holds true for that form of union which is by far the most frequent solution chosen by man in the past and in the present: the union based on conformity with the group, its customs, practices and beliefs. Here again we find a considerable development. In a primitive society the group is small; it consists of those with whom one shares blood and soil. With the growing development of culture, the group enlarges; it becomes the citizenry of a polis the citizenry of a large state, the members of a church. Even the poor Roman felt pride because he could say 'civis romanus sum'; Rome and the empire were his family, his home, his world. Also in con-temporary Western society the union with the group is the prevalent way of overcoming separateness. It is a union in which the individual self disappears to a large extent, and where the aim is to belong to the herd. If i am like everybody else, if i have no feelings or thoughts which make me different, if i conform in custom, dress, ideas, to the pattern of the group, i am saved; saved from the frightening experience of aloneness. The dictatorial systems use threats and terror to induce this conformity; the democratic countries, suggestion and propaganda. There is, indeed, one great difference between the two systems. In the democracies non-conformity is possible and, in fact, by no means entirely absent; in the totalitarian systems, only a few unusual heroes and martyrs can be expected to refuse obedience. But in spite of this difference the democratic societies show an over-whelming degree of conformity. The reason lies in the fact that there has to be an answer to the quest for union, and if there is no other or better way, then the union of herd con-formity becomes the predominant one. One can only understand the power of the fear to be different, the fear to be only a few steps away from the herd, if one understands the depths of the need not to be separated. Sometimes this fear of non-conformity is rationalized as fear of practical dangers which could threaten the non-conformist. But actually, people wantto conform to a much higher degree than they are forced to conform, at least in the Western democracies.

This resistance of the anal father to critique becomes especially apparent in the case of Mr. Keating in Dead Poets Society. While the film’s final scene shows the students successfully transgressing the demands of the headmaster (the representative of the symbolic father), no such transgression occurs with Keating. Earlier in the film, Keating commands three students to walk around the school courtyard, and when they begin to walk uniformly with the other students clapping in unison, Keating stops them and upbraids them (kindly of course) for their conformity. He urges each student to discover his own individual way of walking—i.e., to find his own private enjoyment. When Charlie Dalton (Gale Hansen) refuses to walk at Keating’s command, this moment of disobedience does not in any way subvert Keating’s authority. On the contrary, Keating points out that Dalton proves his point: his subversive display fits right into Keating’s “lesson plan.” In the face of the anal father’s demand for each student to find his private enjoyment, there is no clear path to subversion. In refusing to play along, one plays along all the more. Unlike the symbolic father, the anal father invites our subversion and thereby quells its subversive sting.

Social constructs punish us if we refuse to conform but then have the audacity to complain that they cannot find a unique art form

falling in love is a lot like buying a new pair of boots. You start off head over heels. These are the best boots you’ve ever owned! But then, inevitably, they start to chafe. They’re uncomfortable and feel like they’re trying to force your foot into some awkward new shape rather than conforming to the bones defining you. They look so good though you hesitate to let them go. And what’s a little discomfort? You go through this with every pair of boots anyway, right? So, you give them a little time. Maybe your foot changes a little where the leather won’t give, and the boot gives where your foot refuses. Soon, you have the best boots you’ve ever owned. They’re comfortable and still new enough they look great. All you see is what’s right about them.