Solomon Asch

"We must distinguish between the pressure to conform and the desire for belonging."

"The group has tremendous power to distort perception, but individual cognition has the power to resist."

"When faced with ambiguity, we turn to others; when we turn to others, we often lose ourselves."

"Social influence operates beneath the threshold of awareness, shaping thought before we know we are thinking."

"The majority opinion is a fact about social reality, not about objective reality."

"Independence requires not immunity to social pressure, but awareness of it."

"We are more suggestible than we care to admit, and more resistant than we might fear."

"The experiments reveal that humans are not purely rational beings, but beings for whom society is rational."

"To stand alone is to stand in the tradition of all those who have seen truly."

"Social pressure operates as both constraint and opportunity for human development."

"The question of conformity is ultimately the question of what we are willing to sacrifice for acceptance."

"In matters of perception and judgment, consensus is often the enemy of truth."

"The human being is a fundamentally social animal, yet capable of unsocial thinking."

"We underestimate how much of our thinking is social thinking."

"Conformity becomes problematic not when we agree, but when we pretend to agree while disagreeing."

"The mind under social pressure is not a free mind, though it may believe itself to be free."

"Dissent serves democracy as doubt serves science."

"The group consensus may feel like truth, but feeling is not evidence."

"We are capable of extraordinary resistance when we understand the mechanisms of persuasion."

"Social psychology reveals that we are never purely individual thinkers; we are always partly social thinkers."

"To maintain integrity in the face of group pressure is to maintain contact with reality."

"The experiments demonstrate that people are far more malleable than democratic theory assumes."

"Conformity is not a failure of character but a feature of human social existence."

"The minority within the group serves as a guardian of perception against collective delusion."

"We conform not only to please others, but to assure ourselves that we are normal."

"Independence of judgment is possible, but it is always costly in terms of social comfort."

"The study of conformity is the study of what binds us and what tears us apart."

"Social influence is invisible precisely because it is so powerful."

"To think against the group is to think in solitude, even when surrounded."

"The pressure to conform increases as the stakes of being wrong increase."