David Harsanyi Quotes

Beliefs and values that have held sway for thousands of years will be questioned as never before.

Culture is a product of law. And laws create norms for society. This is why anyone who wants to change the culture of a country must try to change the norms of the country.

When cultural change succeeds, it succeeds because it's so embedded in what we do that we don't have to think about.

Look - There's good creepy and there's bad creepy. Today's creepy is tomorrow's necessity.

What used to be considered conservative values... are increasingly becoming more mainstream values.

Cultural views often don't move at all for a very long time, but when they move they can move very fast.

Cultural change always precedes political change.

What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.

How is it possible that in just the last ten years all of these things which were taboo throughout our culture, throughout the culture, things that were taboo are now not only normal but celebrated, and people who were not really supportive of them are called kooks and the new weirdos?

Once you break the social norm and create a new social norm, all of a sudden it can stay with us for a long time.

The conception of what is normal varies not only with the culture but also within the same culture, in the course of time.

What men call civilization is the condition of present customs; what they call barbarism, the condition of past ones.

Cultures grow on the vine of tradition.

The bad news is that the movement toward the partnership side of the social scale (and it is always a matter of degree, as no society is a pure partnership or domination system) has been fiercely resisted and countered by periodic regressions. So domination systems have rebuilt themselves in different forms - be they secular or religious, eastern or western, leftist or rightist.

This world of ours is a new world, in which the unit of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed, and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is new, not because it has never been there before, but because it has changed in quality.

Change occurs slowly. Very often a legal change might take place but the cultural shift required to really accept its spirit lingers in the wings for decades.

But a law, however venerable be the sanction, cannot suddenly transform the temper of the times . . .

I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever 'written'… It evolves in the minds of a thinking community.

I think people look at revolution too much in terms of power. I think revolution has to be seen more anthropologically, in terms of transitions from one mode of life to another.

The minority of one generation is usually the majority of the next.

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next.

Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent

The heterodoxy of one generation is the orthodoxy of the next.

There was nothing abnormal about it when homosexuality was the norm.

I feel like I have been able to notice throughout the incremental march of history during the course of my own lifetime patterns emerging, and there's a sort of a rubber band effect that happens where social growth and change is concerned.