Quotes about social-norms

The fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence.

Do you really believe ... that everything historians tell us about men – or about women – is actually true? You ought to consider the fact that these histories have been written by men, who never tell the truth except by accident.

If it ever occurs to people to value the honour of the mind equally with the honour of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort.

By heavens! there is something after all in the world allowing one man to steal a horse while another must not look at a halter. Steal a horse straight out. Very well. He has done it. Perhaps he can ride. But there is a way of looking at a halter that would provoke the most charitable of saints into a kick.

You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you're not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn't a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems withou

Like many who'd married in the war, my parents were finding it hard to survive the peace. This wasn't because they had discovered that they didn't love each other once their life together wasn't spiced with constant separations and the threat of death. Far from it. But they hadn't chosen each other so much against the social grain that they were tense, self-conscious, embattled, as though something was supposed to go wrong. Their families didn't like their marriage, nor did the village.

It tugged at his soul not to talk to other writers about his work. He loved the bank, keeping it secure and compliant with the laws and regulations. People assumed these things happened by magic. They did not. Hauer never talked about it outside the office. He didn't want to make the other writers uncomfortable. If he developed a reputation as someone who brought his work with him to writers conferences they would all turn away, to sip and swizzle their drinks without him.

If someone asks you how you are, you are meant to say FINE. You are not meant to say that you cried yourself to sleep last night because you hadn't spoken to another person for two consecutive days. FINE is what you say.

The imagination serves us only when the mind is absolutely free of any prejudice. A single prejudice suffices to cool off the imagination. This whimsical part of the mind is so unbridled as to be uncontrollable. Its greatest triumphs, its most eminent delights consist in smashing all the restraints that oppose it. Imagination is the enemy of all norms, the idolater of all disorder and of all that bears the color of crime.

What is in the minds of the majority the society is unmindful of.

Males have been groomed since birth, according to the specifications of a sick and perverse society, to become instruments of war.

With genius, as with beauty -- all, well almost all, is forgiven.

The culture were live in ripples through our daily lives, sending messages about what is considered "normal" and healthy by society.

Human security depends on a system where each rational individual calculates that it is more profitable not to rebel.

The real problem here is a massive elephant in the room: our own culture. Our social values, our media - so influential on impressionable young girls - that have been allowed, for millenia, to send out this powerful, alienating message about girls and sport: that sport is unfeminine, that sport makes you sweaty and muscular, that sport is swearing and violence, that sport is ugliness in a world where women’s sole priority, value and focus should be beauty and becoming an object of desire.

Even within our culture, there are times when breasts stop being read as bouncy sex balls: when women are breastfeeding, there's pretty wide acceptance of the fact that shouting 'phwoar' is bad form.

I always think the opening moments of a party are the hardest, before everyone has had enough to drink.

Ignorance binds people tighter than culture.

We are poor indeed if we are only sane.

I find it hilarious when I see 'not alive' fearing death

This pre-eminence is something [men] have unjustly arrogated to themselves. And when it's said that women must be subject to men, the phrase should be understood in the same sense as when we say we are subject to natural disasters, diseases, and all the other accidents of this life: it's not a case of being subjected in the sense of obeying, but rather of suffering an imposition, not a case of serving them fearfully, but rather of tolerating them in a spirit of Christian charity, since they have

It is time to effect a revolution in female manners - time to restore to them their lost dignity - and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world. It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners.

What is natural, needs to be looked upon, scrutinized and reshaped by each generation of the world, to make it compatible with the path of progress of a civilized society.

The more serious about gardening I became, the more dubious lawns seemed. The problem for me was not, as it was for my father, the relation to my neighbors that a lawn implied; it was the lawn’s relationship to nature. For however democratic a lawn may be with respect to one’s neighbors, with respect to nature it is authoritarian. Under the mower’s brutal indiscriminate rotor, the landscape is subdued, homogenized, dominated utterly. I became convinced that lawn care had about as much to do with

Men are different sheep are all alike.

Secret of man's Mortality Man has transformed from immortal to become a mere mortal being all because of our mental love for sex and evil.

The high-minded pursuit of a Jiu Jitsu practitioner pursuing mastery cannot coexist well with the modern world. Our values vary immensely from our contemporaries. This pursuit leaves societal norms slaughtered in our wake. Those who share this journey will praise our efforts those in the hive will think we have lost it. We must be willing to be misunderstood if we are to understand ourselves.

People of civilized countenance made much of exposing the soft underbellies of their psyche - effete and sensitive were the brands of finer breeding. It was easy for them, safe, and that was the whole point, after all: a statement of coddled opulence that burned the throats of the poor more than any ostentatious show of wealth.

My silence never means I don’t have nothing to talk, but it was important who were audiences and what was the topic.

Sex: In America an obsession. In other parts of the world a fact.

Some people's blameless lives are to blame for a good deal.

A crime is born in the gap between the morality of society and that of the individual.

All the men’s clothes she wore just called attention to how much of a girl she was.

..If not for the influence of Humans, I would not be Human. Shouldn't it be concerning that the quality of such examples continues to dwindle?

I shake my head at my friend. “Not only is they lines, but you know good as I do where them lines be drawn.” Aibileen shakes her head. “I used to believe in em. I don’t anymore. They in our heads. People like Miss Hilly is always trying to make us believe they there. But they ain’t.

It was much easier to explain the veil than to answer questions about the wounds.

Riding in a carriage without an escort is modern. But traveling out and about unescorted is unheard of.

It is the socially determined norms and traditions of gender roles, which must be challenged, and challenged with vigor. In nearly all countries, including America, the truth is that women have a low social status, and are considered inferior.

You can tell a lot about the intellectual and moral progress of a nation’s citizens, by the quality and nature of the films they watch.

At the behest of the criterion of authenticity, much that was once thought to make up the very fabric of culture has come to seem of little account, mere fantasy or ritual, or downright falsification. Conversely, much that culture traditionally condemned and sought to exclude is accorded a considerable moral authority by reason of the authenticity claimed for it, for example, disorder, violence, unreason.

I love social media. I love the connectivity it provides, the creativity it allows, and the breathtaking wealth of information we all have at our fingertips because of it.

I do wish men, when they're taking their leave from a lady at dawn, wouldn't insist on adjusting their clothes to a nicety, or fussily tying their lacquered cap securely into place. After all, who would laugh at a man or criticize him if they happened to catch sight of him on his way home from an assignation in fearful disarray, with his cloak or hunting costume all awry?