Quotes About Social norms

I find that the longer I live, the more I worry about people and the less I worry about rules.

Because no one has ever seen a woman behave so wrongly as to ask a man to love her, unless she were more deranged than the next person. I would be a proven fool if I ever spoke a word that would bring me reproach. If he were to learn it from my mouth, I think he would lose esteem for me and lastingly reproach me for having spoken first. May love never stoop so low that I beseech him first since he would then esteem me less.

Why on earth do adults have to laugh so loudly at everything? Hyena laughs, the women worse than the men—except for the times the men were worse than the women.

Come on, let's get you a drink. How's your love life, anyway? Oh God. Why can't married people understand that this is no longer a polite question to ask? We wouldn't rush up to them and roar, "How's your marriage going? Still have sex?

Jane Collier's Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (a spoof conduct book published in 1753)

At school he had done things which had formerly seemed to him very horrid and made him feel disgusted with himself when he did them; but when later on he saw that such actions were done by people of good position and that they did not regard them as wrong, he was able not exactly to regard them as right, but to forget about them entirely or not be at all troubled at remembering them.

If you only knew what those society women are, and women in general! My father is right. Selfish, vain, stupid, trivial in everything—that's what women are when you see them in their true colors! When you meet them in society it seems as if there were something in them, but there's nothing, nothing, nothing! No, don't marry, my dear fellow; don't marry!

So much the worse for those who follow the fashion. The only happy marriages I know are marriages of convenience." "Yes, but then how often the happiness of the convenient marriages flies away like dust just because that passion turns up that they have refused to recognize," said Vronsky.

It was Italy after all. People probably hit each other all the time.

In France, I am just Madame Campbell. In Jamaica, nobody uses my title.

We are all actors,' said Connie. 'Our true feelings and desires hidden behind masks carved from the trammels of accepted social norms. Wouldn't you say so?

Humans are more or less identical except for a few peculiar habits generally delineated by geographic circumstances and historical precedent. But essentially, they´re all identical and reading from the same rulebook. To get along you have to appreciate the rules, but also know that other people know the rules - and that they know that you know the rules. Get it?

In my day, there were things that were done, and things that were not done, and there was even a way of doing things that were not done.

We're more sexually repressed than men, having been given a much more strict puritanical code of behavior than men ever have.

Quite a lot of British women stop working when they have children, and that is rarely the case in Denmark. We have a very flat, structured way of approaching everything. Nobody's the boss. In a sense, we're all equal.

Orange County is a place where you can ask people if that's their real hair color; you can ask them if that diamond is real; you can ask if that car is a lease. But you cannot ask if someone is a Democrat.

I think a lot of people in their lives feel like they don't fit in, even if it looks like they do. People feel like outsiders even if others think we, the lives we live, have everything. If they are popular or they have everything they are supposed to have. Even then, people still don't feel quite included.

Humor results when society says you can't scratch certain things in public, but they itch in public.

If it would destroy [a 12-year-old boy] to be called a girl, what are we then teaching him about girls?

Women breast-feeding in public always defend themselves by saying, "It's a beautiful thing." Yeah, so is sex, but I've never done it in the middle of Denny's. Although that at least would be a Grand Slam Breakfast.

Few had much room to cast stones, but hypocrisy has never failed the English middle class in any latitude, and they flung them in plenty with delighted, shocked abandon – rocks, boulders, limited in size only by fear for their husband's advancement. Conciliating discretion had never been among Mrs Villiers's qualities, and if subjects for malignant gossip had been wanting she would have provided them by the elephant-load.

If toting the standard equipment is not what male or female, exactly what does? well, duh, its barrettes. At least thats what kids think it is your clothing, hairstyle, toy choice, favorite color. Slippery stuff, that. You can see how perilously easy would be to err

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

Poetry and art are key influences in changing how we look at taboos.