Quotes About Customs

grand that he had the right to keep his hat on in the presence chamber of the king.

This is not a tidy world of tyrannical men and victimized women, but a messier realm of oppressive social customs adhered to by men and women alike. As we said, laws can help, but the greatest challenge is to change these ways of thinking.

Of all the things that people do in the name of God, killing a girl because she doesn't bleed on her wedding night is among the most cruel. Yet the hymen--fragile, rarely seen, and pretty pointless--remains an object of worship among many religions and societies around the world...it is frequently worth more than a human life.

Human cultures kept the oddest gestures.

Reformar la sociedad por medio de leyes es el sueño del ciudadano incauto y el preámbulo discreto de toda tiranía. La ley es forma jurídica de la costumbre o atropello a la libertad.

The anonymity of the modern city is as intolerable as the familiarity of modern customs. Life should resemble a salon of people with good manners, where all know each other but where none hug each other.

When he repudiates rites, man reduces himself to an animal that copulates and eats.

There are two symmetrical forms of barbarism: peoples who have nothing but customs and peoples who respect nothing but laws.

Every age has its pleasures, its style of wit, and its own ways.

In Hartford, Connecticut, it is illegal for a husband to kiss his wife on Sundays.

Customs are formed, and the descendants of men are trapped therein. The generations pass without a chance to weed out the foolish from the essential—a regrettable situation.

I didn't have no sure 'nough weddin'. Me and Julie just jumped over de broom in front of Marster and us was married. Dat was all dere was to it. Dat was de way most of de slave folks got married dem days. Us knowed better dan to ask de gal when us wanted to get married. Us just told our Marster and he done de askin'. Den, if it was all right with de gal, Marster called all de

Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.

In short, contrary to the founders—and in ways they do not realize themselves—Americans today are heedlessly pursuing a vision of freedom that is short-lived and suicidal. Once again, freedom without virtue, leadership without character, business without trust, law without customs, education without meaning and medicine, science and technology without human considerations can end only in disaster.

Every soul has religion, which is only another word for its existence. All living forms in which it expresses itself—all arts, doctrines, customs, all metaphysical and mathematical form-worlds, all ornament, every column and verse and idea—are ultimately religious, and must be so.

OUR MAGIC WORDS are 'please' and 'thank you'. The French have those, plus two more: 'hello' and 'goodbye'. They're especially zealous about making their children say 'bonjour' as soon as they walk into somebody's house. Children don't get to slouch in under the cover of their parents' greeting.

It was as if California, specifically the Bay Area, had most of what Nietzsche once defined as the 'precondition' of Buddhism: a very mild climate, very gentle and liberal customs, no militarism; and that it is the higher and even learned classes in which the movement has its home. The supreme goal is cheerfulness, stillness, absence of desire, and this goal is achieved.1

Each culture defines its own idiosyncracies and then forgets that it has done so.

Of course it doesn't make sense." Lady Wendall said. "The rules of society rarely do.

The automatic use of Du, even to strangers if they were friends of friends, was very surprising. Sie, it seemed, meant relegation to the outer darkness and people had been known to fight with swords about the matter.

But it's a tradition, as if that alone is reason enough. Slavery and buying your wife were traditions, too.

Every place has its little superstitions, and everyone laughs at what the folk across the river think.

Every culture is different, but one thing is always true: the surest way to give offense is to refuse the hospitality of your host.

There is one possibility left,' he wrote on Christmas Day 1913, 40 years ahead of his time, 'an industrial customs union, of which sooner or later, for better or worse, the states of Western Europe would become members… Fuse the industries of Europe into one … and political interests will fuse too.' (2)