Quotes About Social norms

From the minute you start school, you're fed a bunch of lies: Be yourself. Don't follow the crowd, blah blah. What they really mean is: Follow the crowd. Just make sure it's the right one."' – Total Constant Order (208)

I knew from a very, very early age that I was gay, although in the social environment in Venezuela, you don't ever let that be known.

My grandmother had a Miss Margaret's School of Dance to teach tap and ballet to kids, but I never studied it. I was raised a Mormon and they're dancing fools. It's the only vice they have - dancing.

'Believe women' only works as a rule of thumb when all women are good. That myth falls flat outside Victorian England.

I've always thought there was a fair amount of dishonesty involved in politeness.

Going wherever you please, any time of day or night. Doing a man's work, when you should be at home with a mending basket. You'll do more good for the world that way than trying to become a man." "I have no desire to become a man," Garrett said coolly. "That would be backsliding.

You think he should turn to dairying and livestock," Kathleen said. "It would be easier and more profitable than trying to farm lowland clay." "You may be right," she told him ruefully. "But in this part of England, breeding livestock is not considered as respectable as working the land." "What the devil is the difference? Either way, one ends up shoveling manure.

Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm, and behave just as outrageously as the world allows.

I was surprised. It's not often that a woman receives an apology from a man, especially not in such circumstances. I am far more used to being told: You need to learn to take a joke, or; Why must you be so sensitive? Little girls are taught the lesson almost from the cradle. Boys will be boys. It's a man's world. It's because he likes you.

In Hollywood today, it's cool for guys to wear nail polish and earrings in their lips and tongues. I don't get it.

That awkward moment when you see 9 year olds with boyfriends or girlfriends, while you're still single.

Buddies didn't have touchable breasts or intriguing vaginas. Buddies were people you burped around and bragged to about other women.

A certain emotional frostiness is the heritage of a culture that puts great stock in WASP values: One does not talk about money sex, religion, and above all, one does not expose one's feelings. If a case can be made for the cultural contouring of personality, the Puritan ethic is the culprit in such rubrics as 'Children should be seen and not heard' and 'Never complain, never explain.

My...principles in talking to a woman: do not ask permission; do not say hello; ...do not let her speak first...give a woman the chance to reject something else besides me...statements, not questions, were less likely to lead to no.

Nobody loves the way he ought to, he loves the way he has to or is allowed to.

Me hace gracia, desde entonces, escuchar como los hombres disertan sobre la estupidez de las mujeres que adoran el poder, el dinero o la fama, como si adorar un liguero fuera menos estúpido...

I want my son to wear a helmet 24 hours a day. If it was socially acceptable I'd be the first one to have my kid in a full helmet and like a cage across his face mask.

You can't expose that breast on the street. You can't have a breast exposed in the middle of Manhattan at twelve-fifteen at 116th Street and Broadway.

Yeah, and by the way? How much does it suck that I'm an adult if I kill somebody, and not if I want a beer?

What's a slut? I ask him. A girl who puts out too easily. Puts out what? I imagine Greer putting out dinner and don't understand what Iwan wouldn't like about that. Puts out, you know... His face, already beet red from our run, turns a darker scarlet. Sex. I wonder where Greer puts the sex out.

How readily the rules of female behavior—gentleness, acquiescence, ever-mindfulness—turned to shackles.

If it became customary to go out into the street stark naked I should not be the first nor the last to conform.

The proper way to eat a fig, in society, Is to split it in four, holding it by the stump, And open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honied, heavy-petalled four-petalled flower.

Lying on the floor, with the carved panels of the ceiling flickering dimly above, I found myself thinking that I had always heretofore assumed that the tendency of eigh­teenth-century ladies to swoon was due to tight stays; now I rather thought it might be due to the idiocy of eighteenth-century men.