H. L. Mencken Quotes About Conformity

• Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.

  H. L. Mencken

  Wisdom, Progress, Aberration

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Second Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.470, Vintage

• And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.

  H. L. Mencken

  Children, School, Thinking

• The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society.

  H. L. Mencken

  Freedom, Philosophy, Ideas

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