Uniformity Quotes

“Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a Censor morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth. Let us reflect that it is inhabited by a thousand millions of people. That these profess probably a thousand different systems of religion. That ours is but one of that thousand. That if there be but one right, and ours that one, we should wish to see the 999 wandering sects gathered into the fold of truth. But against such a majority we cannot effect this by force. Reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free enquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

“variety is life; uniformity is death”
― peter kropotkin

“There were those who loved liberty, who cried out to live their own lives, to strive, to rise above, to achieve, and those bent on the mindless equality of stagnation brought about through the enforcement of an artificial, arbitrary, gray uniformity--those who wanted to transcend through their own effort, and those who wanted others to think for them and were willing to pay the ultimate price.”
― Terry Goodkind, Faith of the Fallen

“Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“A humorous treatment of the rigid uniformitarian view came from Mark Twain. Although the shortening of the Mississippi River he referred to was the result of engineering projects eliminating many of the bends in the river, it is a thought-provoking spoof:
The Mississippi between Cairo and New Orleans was twelve hundred and fifteen miles long one hundred and seventy-six years ago. . . . Its length is only nine hundred and seventy-three miles at present.
Now, if I wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific people, and “let on” to prove what had occurred in the remote past by what had occurred in a given time in the recent past . . . what an opportunity is here! Geology never had such a chance, nor such exact data to argue from! . . .
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. . . . There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”
― Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

“All the work of the crystallographers serves only to demonstrate that there is only variety everywhere where they suppose uniformity ... that in nature there is nothing absolute, nothing perfectly regular.”
― Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon

“No peace is possible between the novelist and the agélaste [those who do not laugh]. Never having heard God's laughter, the agélastes are convinced that the truth is obvious, that all men necessarily think the same thing, and that they themselves are exactly what they think they are. But it is precisely in losing the certainty of truth and the unanimous agreement of others that man becomes an individual. The novel is the imaginary paradise of individuals. It is the territory where no one possesses the truth, neither Anna nor Karenin, but where everyone has the right to be understood, both Anna and Karenin.”
― Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel

“Unity in the secular world and sadly among most Christian churches is based on uniformity of interest or viewpoints. The oneness in Jesus Christ crosses all boundaries and separations. Anyone with the faith of Jesus Christ can immediately enjoy the innate oneness with another who also has the faith of Jesus regardless of differing political or doctrinal views.”
― Henry Hon, ONE: Unfolding God's Eternal Purpose from House to House

“The uniformity of the earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled. It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is a family resemblance.”
― Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

“La variété, c'est la vie, l'uniformité, c'est la mort."

[De l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation dans leur rapports avec la civilisation européenne (1914)]”
― Benjamin Constant

“The cities were sucking all the life of the country into themselves and destroying it. Men were no longer individuals but units in a vast machine, all cut to one pattern, with the same tastes and ideas, the same mass-produced education that did not educate but only pasted a veneer of catchwords over ignorance. Why do you want to bring that back?”
― Leigh Brackett, The Long Tomorrow

“We live in a uniform civilization, within well-defined cultural models: furnishings, decorative elements, blankets, record player have all been chosen among a certain number of given possibilities. What can they reveal to you about what she is really like?”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“Here were the same long cold bare corridors, the same lowest common denominator of design and decoration, with every light source designed so as to irritate as few people as possible and to please just as few.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who usually feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

“The aim of scientific thought, then, is to apply past experience to new circumstances; the instrument is an observed uniformity in the course of events. By the use of this instrument it gives us information transcending our experience, it enables us to infer things that we have not seen from things that we have seen; and the evidence for the truth of that information depends on our supposing that the uniformity holds good beyond our experience.”
― William Kingdon Clifford, Lectures and Essays by the Late William Kingdon Clifford, F.R.S.

“The cities were sucking all the life of the country into themselves and destroying it. Men were no longer individuals, but units in a vast machine, all cut to one pattern, with the same tastes and ideas, the same mass-produced education that did not educate but only pasted a veneer of catchwords over ignorance.”
― Leigh Brackett, The Long Tomorrow

“Uniformity...creates a void, and Nature abhors a vacuum.”
― Henri-Frédéric Amiel, The Private Journal of Henri Frederic Amiel

“Even a simple haircut or facial shave is in my opinion an expression of uniformity to following a certain trend or portraying a certain image.”
― Mango Wodzak, 2020 Vision

“The student asked: What should I be, master? River, ocean, lake or mountain or what? The master replied: Be unique! There are already many rivers, many oceans, many lakes; be something different because the world needs diversity not uniformity; it needs something nonesuch with incomparable talents!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“GUCCI. Label me down with these codes that are commercialed in uniform. Military stripes, commander in chief, veteran in the word play, call it a beast. In plain sight hidden from the mass, where's Waldo? This arsenal I call 'Mind' is highly explosive cargo, a word flow, it's one in a million like solo.”
― Jose R. Coronado, The Land Flowing With Milk And Honey

“The political history remembers those hired, and selected leaders, who conspire to bring uniformity in the National Assemblies, breaking and eliminating the developed democracies; which indeed, results in embracing failure and sorry. Such institutions and key figures that cross the limits and oath, have to yield to its enemy without war. Unfortunately, such ones never learn from the bitter tragedies; which define that as traitors, in the patriot uniform.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“The color of blood is RED in all living species.”
― Amit Abraham

“When a light appears in the darkness, the darkness becomes richer; and when a darkness appears in the light, the light becomes richer! Uniformity impoverishes, discrepancy enriches!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Once the desire for comprehensive urban planning is established, the logic of uniformity and regimentation is well-nigh inexorable. Cost effectiveness contributes to this tendency. Just as it saves a prison trouble and money if all prisoners wear uniforms of the same material, color, and size, every concession to diversity is likely to entail a corresponding increase in administrative time and budgetary cost. If the planning authority does not need to make concessions to popular desires, the one-size-fits-all solution is likely to prevail.”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“You cannot create any originality while acting with the herd, because the herd you are in wants uniformity, not differentiation! Originality only becomes possible when you stand out from the herd.”
― Mehmet Murat ildan