When ideas go unexamined and unchallenged for a long enough time, certain things happen. They become mythological, and they become very, very powerful. They create conformity. They intimidate.

—E. L. Doctorow

power ideas myth conformity

About E. L. Doctorow

Portrait of E. L. Doctorow

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow (January 6, 1931 – July 21, 2015) was an American novelist, editor, and professor, known for his historical fiction. He wrote three volumes of short fiction, a stage drama, and twelve novels, including the award-winning Ragtime (1975), Billy Bathgate (1989), and The March (2005). Like many of...

More quotations from E. L. Doctorow

You can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it; it is by nature self-erasing; you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again.

—E. L. Doctorow

truth memory sex brain

More quotations tagged with “conformity”

For most men life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.

—Clifton Fadiman

freedom conformity fitting in

Sometimes you have to steer away from the crowd in order to be a better person.

—Simone Elkeles in Leaving Paradise

independence conformity crowd

Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?

—James Thurber

difference conformity

I've never walked the same path other people found comfortable and I'm not going to start now.

—Lora Leigh in Forbidden Pleasure

comfort conformity path

The reward for conformity was that everyone liked you except yourself.

—Rita Mae Brown

self-love reward conformity

History

23 Nov 2014 Added