A Nonconformist ...

... and proud of it. Recently my daughter and I had a conversation about conformity and we came to the same conclusion - we are both nonconformist.

What is nonconformity? According to dictionary definitions, nonconformity is:

• Refusal or failure to conform to accepted standards, conventions, rules, or laws
• Failure or refusal to conform to an established church
• Refusal to conform to an established or conventional creed or practice
  

What others have to say about nonconformity:

"Nothing pains some people more than having to think." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

"When all think alike, then no one is thinking." - Walter Lippman

"All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions." - Adlai Stevenson

"People would rather be wrong than be different." - Henry Jacobsen

"Once in a while it really hits people that they don't have to experience the world in the way they have been told to." - Alan Keightley

"Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion." - Charles Kuralt

"The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them." - George Bernard Shaw

"If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success." - John D. Rockefeller

"He who never walks except where he sees other men's tracks will make no discoveries." - Unknown

"I may not be better than other people, but at least I'm different." - Jean Jacques Rousseau

"Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity." - Christopher Morley

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." - Dr. Seuss

"Not all those who wander are lost." - J.R.R. Tolkien

"You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect." - Mark Twain

"One who walks in another's tracks leaves no footprints." - Proverb

"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation." - Herman Melville

"If you keep doing things like you've always done them, what you'll get is what you've already got." - Author Unknown

"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"Conformity is that jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth." - John F. Kennedy

So ask yourself, are you a conformist or a nonconformist??