Quotes About Social norms

Isn't making a smoking section in a restaurant like making a peeing section in a swimming pool?

In some company it's perfectly all right to prick your finger, but very bad form to finger your prick.

It had never occurred to him that he should live in any other than what he would have called an ordinary way, with green glasses for hock, and excellent waiting at table. In warming himself at French social theories he had brought away no smell of scorching. We may handle even extreme opinions with impunity while our furniture, our dinner-giving, and preference for armorial bearings in our own ease, link us indissolubly with the established order.

I am not quite sure whether clever men ever dance.

One didn't talk about one's feelings any more than one talked about taking out the garbage.

A man having an affair is acceptable, women are called characterless. Why?

My dad is this typical orthodox, narrow-minded Punjabi man in front of whom you can't even utter the word called 'boyfriend.'

I think that's what I really love about acting; all of the social and moral codes of society can be thrown away when you're acting, and it's just you being totally committed to the role.

For some reason, we're brainwashed to think if you're not a thug or an idiot, you're not black enough. If you go to school, make good grades, speak intelligent, and don't break the law, you're not a good black person.

The cultural pressure for a middle-class Chinese-American to walk, talk and act like a lower-class thug from Chinatown is nil. The same can be said of Jews, or of any other ethnic group. But in black America the folly is so commonplace it fails to attract serious attention.

History is not a long series of centuries in which men did all the interesting/important things and women stayed home and twiddled their thumbs in between pushing out babies, making soup and dying in childbirth.

I grew up in the '60s and '70s when men were required to wear a suit, shirt, and tie every day to be taken seriously. I was at the tail end of that generation, and it had a significant impact on me.

I remember when people actually wore coats and ties to theatre every night. They don't anymore. It's very different.

The privileges of a few do not make common law.

It wasn't a big deal to marry your half-brother in those times; there just weren't enough people on earth for people to start getting picky about incest.

Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers. Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country.

It's like when someone says, 'How are you?' do you say, 'Well, mt head hurts and I'm lonely and depressed and I'm worried about everything and the world is collapsing and full of evil? Or do you say, I'm fine?

Once a month, some women act like men act all the time.

Now why should that man have fainted? But he did,and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!

I don't know if they're really like everybody else, or if they're able to pretend they are.

Once you break the social norm and create a new social norm, all of a sudden it can stay with us for a long time.

Hen nights should be banned. You're honour-bound to behave atrociously, then feel terribly ashamed afterwards. (This Charming Man)

But as far as your virginity is concerned... Now that you are married and divorced, it's normal that you're no longer a virgin! You can make love with whomever you want, without anyone knowing! You know! There's no meter down here!

They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of good.