Social media + clickbait journalism have metastasized into "permanently outraged lynch mobs roaming the Internet, cowing people into silence."

The conformist is not born. He is made. I believe the brainwashing process begins in the schools and colleges.

Just try telling a teenager that he’s a conformist. Ha! It’s safer to tweak a tiger’s whiskers. Yet who’s most influenced by fads and fashions? Who is the easiest to turn into a raging mob? The teenager.

Dark side of social media - easier to assemble mobs to force speech and thought.

The so-called Facebook and Twitter revolutions in the Arab world started in hopeful online communities, but once they emerged into the messy offline world, they were commandeered by religious fanatics and military juntas.

Beware the power of the pajama-clad, Cheeto-eating, twitter, blogging hordes. We are legion!

The problem with conformists will always be that when you try to change the system from within, it's not you who changes the system. It's the system that will eventually change you

Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.

Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are.And, of course, so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church.

Our whole culture in this country now is so conformist. I don't even meet that many freaks any more.

There’s a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.

The problem is that we humans are deep conformists.

Mass communication — wonder as it may be technologically and something to be appreciated and valued — presents us wit a serious daner, the danger of conformism, due to the fact that we all view the same things at the same time in all the cities of the country. (p. 73)