Quotes About Norms

The biggest mistake you can make is to accept the norms of your time.

Professions can create forms of ethical conversation that are impossible between a lonely individual and a distant government. If members of professions think of themselves as groups with common interests, with norms and rules that oblige them at all times, then they can gain confidence and indeed a certain kind of power. Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional. Then there is no such thing as "just following orders.

Professions can create forms of ethical conversation that are impossible between a lonely individual and a distant government. If members of professions think of themselves as groups with common interests, with norms and rules that oblige them at all times, then they can gain confidence and indeed a certain kind of power. Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional.

They had no idea what was or wasn't appropriate behavior, no concept of the usual give and take of normal relationships.

The idea that there is a family somewhere who functions is an odd concept.

I find it odd that people will go to a nice restaurant or to the theater in jeans and T-shirts.

Gender roles are absurd when you actually look at them. The fact that anybody could ever say or think that dressing in women's clothes is wrong, or odd. Women dressing in women's clothes and men dressing in men's clothes is the actually the thing that is really odd.

Sexual behavior was also generally considered off limits.

This is why we have a chief medical officer: to set a norm in society, make judgments on behalf of society, so that individual schools or individual parents don't have to decide.

We seem to have set up some very arcane rules as to when it is actually OK to applaud.

If I lose, then I have to accept that my way of writing books is not the way society says it's okay to write.

The only time it gets weird is which bathroom do I go into sometimes.

Hamas and Hezbollah operate within geopolitical norms. They can be negotiated and reasoned with. ISIL is a different animal altogether - a religious cult an order of magnitude more extreme than even the most extreme Islamic groups of the past.

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

Public opinion exists only where there are no ideas.

Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality.

Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age.

Todo delito es vulgar, de la misma manera que todo lo vulgar es delito.

Is it OK not to be a virgin, yes. Most people aren't virgins, Min. That's why there's people to begin with.

Que si está bien no ser virgen, sí. La mayoría de la gente no lo es, Min. Para empezar, por eso existe la gente.

Times change. The vices of your age are stylish today.

The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement.

At the social/political/ juridical, etc., level, the organizing principle was less to do with games and more to do with the nature of taboos—enormously powerful, often enormously arbitrary, and (crucially) regularly quietly broken, without undermining the fact of the taboo itself. That last element, I think, is sometimes underestimated in the discussions of cultural norms, where they are both asserted and breached. Both those elements are foundational. — author interview

With the online tracking sheet, Cachon was using the hotel-towel strategy. He was publicizing the group norm. Other people are getting their work done on time. Why won't you?