Quotes About Social norms

To be likeable as a woman, it seems, you have to ensure that you're also non-threatening and slightly useless.

It's important to me that on 'Family Feud' I could kiss all the people. It sounds crazy but when I first came here Petula Clark was on a show with Nat King Cole and he kissed her on the cheek and eighty-one stations in the South canceled him. I kissed black women daily and nightly on 'Family Feud' and the world didn't come to an end, did it?

There are also just as many, if not more, women who are anxious to hold down the status quo.

I could never turn to a guy and a girl and ask, 'Are you going steady?' That was absolutely a no-no - it was the Eisenhower period, and no parent wanted their kid going steady, so it wasn't a thing that you could endorse as proper behavior on the air.

How can you respect a culture if the woman has to walk several steps behind her man, has to stay in the kitchen and keep her mouth shut?

Group eating was scarcely less embarrassing than bodily functions

The poet Lord Byron famously proclaimed that lobster salad and champagne were the only things a woman should ever be seen eating.

Only a man will think of a burp as a greeting for another man.

Everything in this room is edible. Even I'm edible. But, that would be called canibalism. It is looked down upon in most societies.

To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all.

Women all think that if a guy likes you he will come and talk to you. That's nonsense - 'actually the opposite is true. The more attractive he finds you, the less likely it is he'll talk to you.

Although homosexuality has been normalised, it is not normal.

I will normally eat about seven or eight mince pies in one sitting. Sometimes, I can get to double figures. My friends, and probably most people, stop at two, so they probably dislike me a bit for it.

Breaking of norms and disregard for decency have huge, long-term costs.

As a novelist, you write about social mores, but not everything can be explained.

He had momentarily forgotten that at a restaurant everyone is supposed to pretend there's an eight-foot wall around each table. Except the waiters, of course, who are supposed to pretend that each table is the only one they're waiting on. Like living in a small town. Notice me when I want to be noticed, but why are you prying when I want to be left alone?

I never take any notice to what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do.

Far be it from me to suggest that all women should go running after gamekeepers for lovers.

Straight people are so fucking weird.

She would do a mans work when she needed to, but she lived and died without ever putting on a pair of pants. She wore dresses. Being a widow, she wore them black. Being a woman of her time she wore them long. the girls of her day I think must have been like well wrapped gifts to be opened by their husbands on their wedding night, a complete surprise. 'Well! What's this!?

Highly familistic, consensual cultures have been the norm throughout history and the world. Modern Europe has been the oddball.

Parties somehow represent the rationing of fun, and that very concept depresses me. You're allowed to act like a tit at parties; therefore by implication, you're not allowed to act like a tit the rest of the time

They say women have no conscience about laws, don't they?" Mrs. MacAvelly suggested. "Why should we?" answered her friend. "We don't make 'em—nor God—nor nature. Why on earth should we respect a set of silly rules made by some men one day and changed by some more the next?" (from According to Solomon)

In a sick society, women who have difficulty fitting in are not ill but demonstrating a healthy and positive response.