Quotes About Norms

Every society honours its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.

It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

His gravest offence had been to accept the world in which he found himself as normal, rational and right.

Believe it or not, a normal human being is one who can have an orgasm and is adjusted to his society.

He let out the amazing truth. For a very long period before the time of Our Ford, and even for some generations afterwards, erotic play between children had been regarded as abnormal (there was a roar of laughter); and not only abnormal, actually immoral (no!): and had therefore been rigorously suppressed.

And then what about the society you're supposed to be adjusted to? Is it a mad society or a sane one? And even if it's pretty sane, is it right that anybody should be completely adjusted to it?

Here nobody's supposed to belong to more than one person. And if you have people in the ordinary way, the others think you're wicked and anti-social.

Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself. Yes, at Society itself...

Regulation of sexual behavior is the preferred route to wider social control.

Women, as usual, were expected to behave better than men, and inevitably attracted criticism for doing things that men were licensed to do with impunity.

But it had not occurred to him to praise her, because in his view she was just doing her duty as a woman and there was nothing special about that." (pg.34)

Unshackled by strict yet arbitrary, misguided norms, outcasts can be, look, act, and associate however they want. And in this ever conformist, cookie-cutter, magazine-celebrity-worshipping, creativity-stifling society, the innovation, courage, and differences of the cafeteria fringe are vital to America's culture and progress. Which is why we must celebrate them.

Few people realize how much courage it takes in a community like ours to ignore the established taboos.

The rule seemed to be that a great woman must either die unwed ... or find a still greater man to marry her. ... The great man, on the other hand, could marry where he liked, not being restricted to great women; indeed, it was often found sweet and commendable in him to choose a woman of no sort of greatness at all.

The cultural ban on having sex with your friends is an inevitable offshoot of a societal belief that the only acceptable reason to have sex is to lead to a monogamous marriagelike relationship.

if gays have achieved the same rights as everyone else, should they be subjected to the same standards as everybody else? Or is there built into gay equality some kind of opt-out?

Among the first couples to get married in the US was one who immediately admitted to an interviewer that they were in an open relationship. What are other people – including heterosexuals – to think of gay marriage

Common sense, in other words, depends on what the sociologist Harry Collins calls collective tacit knowledge, meaning that it is encoded in the social norms, customs, and practices of the world.10

It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

Algorithms are simply incapable of encapsulating human experience, regardless of what Silicon Valley would have us believe. And once companies have taken humans out of the loop and relinquished the reins to machines, there is no telling the sort of cultural norms they will eventually propagate in the future.

Subsequent history is written as if these normative positions were the product of social consensus rather than of conflict

Harassers were often accepted, or even cheered, as mischievous bad boys.

But naked wasn't something done around human pups—although he wanted to ask the men why naked from the waist up was all right for them but females remained covered. That didn't seem fair. Shifting

What is a culture? A culture is what approves or disapproves of the actions in its midst. Yet how rare for approval to be unanimous.