Quotes About Cultural norms

From Hunayn ibn-Ishak (Diogenes,8), we learn about his view of women and education: when he saw a man teaching a girl how to read and write, he advised him not to make a bad thing even worse.

What I'm saying is, a lot of boys don't bother growing into men, because they don't have to--their bodies have already done it and it turns out that's all anybody requires.

Forensic boards, like most guilds, are extremely hierarchical and largely dominated by older white men. Aspiring experts are dependent on the mentorship the guilds offer for credentials and professional development. Second-generation practitioners seek to make their contributions to the field by building on their mentors' work—not by questioning it. The cultural norms create powerful disincentives to challenging orthodoxy or asking the guild masters tough questions.

The team's chairman told him that if the baby is a girl and they decide not to keep her, the Welfare Office would take the baby off their hands and pay the 4000-yuan fine for the illegal birth. It's common knowledge that the Welfare Office sells children in their care to foreigners for a 30,000-yuan profit.

He kept himself in line with popular opinion, which meant popular prejudice.

I'm not an anti-feminist! Of course you're not, Garp told her. They make everything so black and white. Of course they do, said Garp. That's why I hate them. They force you to be like them - or else you're their enemy. Yes, yes, Garp said. I wish I could talk.

In this dirty-minded world," Jenny wrote, "you are either somebody's wife or somebody's whore—or fast on your way to becoming one or the other.

American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.

My parents told me I must get married. I was seen as a failure if I didn't do it.

Aquiles se sonrojó como si le hubieran abofeteado. Una cosa era llevar un vestido, impelido por la necesidad, y otra muy distinta que todos lo supieran. Nuestro pueblo reservaba los más feos apelativos para los hombres que actuaban como mujeres; semejantes insultos habían provocado la pérdida de muchas vidas.

I polled several friends to see how much time they would grant between "a blinding, bad time" and a life that has simply become a depressive waste; the consensus was around seven years. This bespeaks the generosity of my friends -- I imagine most Americans would give themselves a year, maybe two, before they castigated themselves into some form of yanking up the bootstraps.

Civilization, her mother had told her since she was small, was a series of agreements about what was good for everyone, enforced by law. And civilization was only a thin veneer over the savagery and greed that were the human default.

Boys don't cry, but men do.

It was quite normal in that day for a man to use up three or four wives in a normal lifetime.

To his mind, a healthy woman was a broke woman. A dame with money was a kind of a half-assed man.

He realised that in a town a man cannot live as he wishes, but as other people wish.

In the 1790s, more than a century before the invention of modern dating culture, an underground sexual economy flourished on a scale almost unimaginable today. Men, whether they were married or not, enjoyed wide sexual latitude: they could often pursue an active sexual double life without incident. Women, on the other hand, faced a stark contrast between sexual respectability and social ruin.

The family code in Egypt is one of the worst family codes in the Arab world. Polygamy. The husband is having absolute power over the family.

I grew up in a family where we weren't allowed to talk about beauty or to put any emphasis on physical appearance.

Part of my family were ranchers. So you were expected to be quite macho. You weren't expected to cry. I was the exact opposite of that.

Every generation is born into, for the most part, a heterosexual family.

It runs in the family. And don't expect me to be ashamed. Yankees lock away loony relatives, but down here, we prop 'em up on parade floats and march 'em through the middle of town.

I was the third son, and the family tradition was my dad always favored the oldest child.

I've just been to a debutant ball where all the girls were wearing low-cut gowns. It's clear why they're called coming out parties.