Quotes About Norms

When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society.

What I find interesting is working in a society with certain taboos and fashion photography is about that kind of society. To have taboos, then to get around them that is interesting.

Society is constantly recalibrating, redefining what it considers to be moral and immoral.

Our society allows people to be absolutely neurotic and totally out of touch with their feelings and everyone else's feelings, and yet be very respectable.

Monks, nuns, long-term spinsters and bachelors and permanent homosexuals are all, in a reproductive sense, aberrant. Society has bred them, but they have failed to return the compliment.

Every society has the criminals it deserves.

Una vez que el rígido marco de los estamentos sociales fue quebrado, la tarea de "autoidentificación" impuesta a los hombres y mujeres de la modernidad temprana quedó reducida al desafío de vivir "fiel a su clase" ("a la altura de los vecinos"), de adecuarse a los tipos sociales de clases emergentes y modelos de conducta, de imitar, siguiendo un patrón, de "aculturarse", sin perder el paso ni desviarse de la norma.

A few centuries from now, the level of self-knowledge that our own age judges necessary to get married might be thought puzzling, if not outright barbaric. By then, a standard, wholly non-judgemental line of enquiry (appropriate even on a first date), to which everyone would be expected to have a tolerant, good-natured and non-defensive answer, would simply be: 'So in what ways are you mad?' Kirsten

Our judgement of what constitutes an appropriate limit on anything—for example, on wealth or esteem—is never arrived at independently; instead, we make such determinations by comparing our condition with that of a reference group, a set of people who we believe resemble us.

It may now be deemed 'normal' to wear cut-off shorts, expose bellybuttons, marry someone of either gender and watch a little porn for fun, but it also remains indispensably 'normal' to believe that true love should be monogamous and that one's desire should be focused exclusively on one person. To be in dispute with this founding principle is to risk being dismissed, in public or private, with that most dispiriting, caustic and shameful of all epithets: pervert.

If we refrain from questioning the status quo, it is – aside from the weather and the size of our cities – primarily because we associate what is popular with what is right. The

We are all of us, men and women both, the creatures of culture: we do and feel what our societies ask us to, and the demands put upon us are not always consistent or precisely correlated with biology.

Men are generally more law-abiding than women. Women have the feeling that since they didn't make the rules, the rules have nothing to do with them.

in Italia, dove si raggiungono capolavori di sagacia per eludere le leggi che impongono il più piccolo sacrificio o costrizione, stiamo pur certi che le norme attinenti al riposo e simili verranno rispettate senza eccezione con scrupolo prussiano.

There is a written and an unwritten law. The one by which we regulate our constitutions in our cities is the written law; that which arises from custom is the unwritten law.

Though actually kids did not need liberating except from normative training. So it was an anti-colonial project of a sort to defend children from the state.

The clearest way to show what the rule of law means to us in everyday life is to recall what has happened when there is no rule of law.

I am sure there is a right way and a wrong way and in today's life, there are many different rules of being politically correct.

Faithfulness is a social not a biological law.

The culture that trains women to be acquiescent is fundamentally at odds with the culture of athletics.

Society will decide after the technology is created what we will and won't accept.

A fact of modern life is that it takes women longer to get ready than men.

Making women the sexual gatekeepers and telling men they just can't help themselves not only drives home the point that women's sexuality is unnatural, but also sets up a disturbing dynamic in which women are expected to be responsible for men's sexual behavior.

As Feministing.com commenter electron-Blue noted in response to the 2008 New York Times Magazine article "Students of Virginity," on abstinence clubs at Ivy League colleges, "There were a WHOLE LOTTA us not having sex at Harvard . . . but none of us thought that that was special enough to start a club about it, for pete's sake.