Quotes About Social norms

Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language

Audrey felt herself blush again and suddenly, and for no reason she could think, thought of poor Lizzie from Pride and Prejudice, and then remembered how she also felt that Lizzie, nay, all of the Bennet women, in fact, all of the characters in P&P could have benefited from a good roundhouse kick to the head

Those who talk most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is? —George Bernard Shaw

At university (then, though still, I understand, today), things are the opposite of the ways of the normal world: it isn't the sons who hate the fathers, but the fathers who hate the sons.

Propriety is the least of all laws, but the most obeyed.

Duplicity is necessary in daily life, in that it covers many unpleasant things from sight, so they may not disturb the pleasure of others.

Is woman a religion? Well, perhaps you will have the chance of judging for yourselves if you go to America. There you will find men treating women with just the same respect formerly accorded only to religious dignitaries or to great nobles.

Guys don't let other guys keep calling other guys. Okay that came out wrong.

She would have had to keep her headscarf on, never laugh, never smile—if she smiles at a man he will think, 'Ah, she loves me,' " Mohamed explained. As

In order to approximate those shapes and attitudes which are considered normal and desirable, both sexes deform themselves, justifying the process by referring to the primary, genetic difference between the sexes. But of forty-eight chromosomes only one is different: on this difference we base a complete separation of male and female, pretending as it were that all forty-eight were different.

Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.

There's a price to be paid when you raise your daughter to be nice, and she's not the only one who's going to pay it. You'll be right there beside her, trapped by inconvenience, inflexibility and double standards.

Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke; that's their natural and first weapon.

In pre-Watergate, pre-sexual revolution times, such stories just weren't written.

Ritual might be an acceptable term, if shorn of its overtly religious connotations.For me,breaking taboos became nothing less than a stylistic means. I allowed my body, my self, to be pushed into such extreme situations that certain norms of social behaviour could only appear utterly absurd to me.

In the 1960s, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird, and people take Prozac to make it normal.

And so he accepted her frigidity as the normal attribute of a lady, and being a gentleman, he expected nothing more.

My mum didn't date American soldiers during the war, though I think she was amused by them. Of course, you could get a reputation if you went out with American servicemen. It was okay to bring one home if you had family around to keep an eye on you, but a girl wouldn't want to go out with too many of those boys alone.

Scratch the surface of what's socially normal. I suppose in some way all of us have something we display to the public and things we feel too ashamed of or uncomfortable with to reveal to other people.

The masterstroke of male fraternity, I believed, was the practice of never speaking of anything remotely personal or related to one's emotions. That way, no one is ever made uncomfortable. Any such awkward moments can always be dispelled with a flurry of pretend-punches.

An assumption underlying almost all comments on interruptions is that they are aggressive, but the line between what's perceived as assertiveness or aggressiveness almost certainly shifts with an interrupter's gender.

I wonder how people decided that women were supposed to shave their legs and armpits

Someone at an airport in Germany asked me to sing Wherever I Lay My Hat. It's strange, they wouldn't ask people in other professions to perform on the spot.

For me, I think there is no absolute standard on masculinity.