The Square Pegs Quotes

“These are the square pegs that would not fit into round holes. They went backward when everyone went forward, and they went forward when everyone stood still. They said nay when others said aye, and they saw black when others saw white. Despite suffering, economic and spiritual, they refused to be garmented to the strait jacket of conformity. This, and no other, is their achievement - and it is enough. For when our society no longer has a single square peg, when it no longer has a recalcitrant individual out of step, when it no longer has a voice that will rise to dissent and disagree and persists in an unorthodoxy, then, and only then, will man have lost his battle and his last chance.”
― Irving Wallace, The Square Pegs: Some Americans Who Dared to Be Different

“If the eccentric is sufficiently integrated to succeed in some field, to gain wealth or power, he is admired and respected and his oddity is overlooked. But if the eccentric fails, he is pitied or ridiculed and shunned as something strange.”
― Irving Wallace, The Square Pegs: Some Americans Who Dared to Be Different

“Many reasons have been put forward by sociologists, historians, and psychologists to explain the undeviating worship of group living and group thinking in America. James Bryce credited American conformity to uniform political institutions in federal, state, and municipal government. Everywhere schools, libraries, clubs, amusements, and customs were similar. "Travel where you will," he wrote, "you feel that what you have found in one place that you will find in another."

Above all, there was the rapid advance in industrial science. In America, an all-powerful technology, with its standardized techniques and methods of mass production, reached its zenith. As technology attracted larger numbers of people to urban centers, and compressed them into smaller areas, community living became a necessity. This, in turn, encouraged people to co-operate, and created relationships that invite similar activities and opinions.

Gradually there emerged on the American scene, against all natural development of culture and against all individual traits inherent in every man, two striking attitudes that made American conformity broader, more unyielding, and more dangerous. The first attitude, assumed by the majority, was that the act of becoming average, of being normal, was more important than that of being distinct or superior. The second attitude, also assumed by the majority, was that the state of being well adjusted to the crowd and the community was more important than that of being a unique and original human being.”
― Irving Wallace, The Square Pegs: Some Americans Who Dared to Be Different