Quotes About Norms

If a man is happy in America, it is considered he is doing something wrong.

The mistake that straight people made was imposing the monogamous expectation on men. Men were never expected to be monogamous.

Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.

Customs are more powerful than laws.

Normality is death.

As pessoas não percebem o quanto não são livres lá onde mais livres se sentem, porque a regra de tal ausência de liberdade foi abstraída delas.

That civilised life cannot be lived without taboos—that some of them may indeed be justified, and that therefore taboo is not in itself an evil to be vanquished—is a thought too subtle for the aesthetes of nihilism.

The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.

we then must ask: Who are the brothers and sisters? Are they the people in this block or rural area? Or are they everyone in this city . . . or this state . . . or this nation? Or in our global village, would our neighbors include the third and fourth worlds as well as the first and second? If one answers yes to this last question, how could he possibly get norms for poverty when there are such vast differences among the four worlds?

What's casual for a robot isn't necessarily what's casual for a human.

I believe in assigned sex but not necessarily gender. Gender is a learned construct that is detrimental to both sexes.

Although, this is often used with negative connotations, I see ideology as an inherent part of culture.

I can't wait for the day when it is no longer newsworthy that a woman is appointed editor of a newspaper.

La humanidad está muy cerca del salvajismo y tiene que regirse por normas. De lo contrario, nos hundiríamos en nuestra propia naturaleza animal y pereceríamos.

We'd grown up in an era when no one was divorced, and suddenly everyone was divorced.

If a man had to wear heeks they'd be outlawed across the land. Festive in death: chapter 15

T]he social canons and methods by which people build up instinct controls in their communal life are not brought into being deliberately; they evolve over long periods, blindly and without plan. Irregularities and contradictions in drive-controls, huge fluctuations in their severity or leniency, are therefore among the recurrent structural features of the civilizing process.

difference between sociology and morality. Sociology is descriptive; morality is prescriptive.

natural laws are not immutable because they are descriptions of what happens, not prescriptions of what must happen.

Edition to edition, the symptoms change. Sane people are insane by a new standard. People who used to be called insane are the picture of perfect mental health.

Civilization is a condition which unsocial misfits impose on the rest of popular, easygoing, family-oriented humanity.

Chastity may be a fetish invented by certain societies for unknown reasons.

Traditional grammar

More than habits, often based in culture and tradition, norms are regularities in behavior to which people generally conform (Ullmann-Margalit, 1990).