
“I think a lot of snowflakes are alike… and I think a lot of people are alike too.”
Source: American Psycho
This attribution seems to have begun in the 1960s, and has been debunked at "Who really said that?" by Peter Hughes at UU World (15 August 2012) http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/229844.shtml; previously misattributed in A Chosen Faith (1991) by John A. Buehrens; also in Unitarian Universalist Origins: Our Historic Faith by Mark W. Harris https://web.archive.org/web/20060101061859/www.uua.org/info/origins.html
Misattributed
“I think a lot of snowflakes are alike… and I think a lot of people are alike too.”
Source: American Psycho
Sermon 39 Catholic Spirit http://new.gbgm-umc.org/umhistory/wesley/sermons/39/ from the 1872 edition of Wesley's Complete Works - Thomas Jackson, editor
Sermons on Several Occasions (1771)
The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)
Context: I want you to understand what has been done in the world to force men to think alike. It seems to me that if there is some infinite being who wants us to think alike he would have made us alike. Why did he not do so? Why did he make your brain so that you could not by any possibility be a Methodist? Why did he make yours so that you could not be a Catholic? And why did he make the brain of another so that he is an unbeliever — why the brain of another so that he became a Mohammedan — if he wanted us all to believe alike?
After all, maybe Nature is good enough and grand enough and broad enough to give us the diversity born of liberty. Maybe, after all, it would not be best for us all to be just the same. What a stupid world, if everybody said yes to everything that everybody else might say.
The most important thing in this world is liberty. More important than food or clothes — more important than gold or houses or lands — more important than art or science — more important than all religions, is the liberty of man.
“How alike are the groans of love, to those of the dying.”
Source: Under the Volcano (1947), Ch. XII (p. 351)
“Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.”
The Stakes of Diplomacy http://books.google.com/books?id=cyFMAAAAMAAJ&q=%22Where+all+think+alike+no+one+thinks+very+much%22&pg=PA51#v=onepage (1915)
“When everyone thinks alike not much gets thought.”
Ett annat Sverige är möjligt (2006), p. 18
Context: Now it happens to have been the Social Democrats who have regimented the important institutions in society, but it would have been dangerous whichever party it had been. Development and diversity depend on independent initiatives and competition. When everyone thinks alike not much gets thought.
"He sendeth Sun, he sendeth Shower", reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 282; and in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).