Martin E. Marty Quotes

Haldeman is the only man in America in this generation who let his hair grow for a courtroom appearance.

There's an expression in Persian, 'to play with the lion's tail.' I wasn't what Iranian society wanted me to be - a good girl. I played with the lion's tail.

It’s not the mainstream. It’s just the status quo.

Most Americans never work as hard as when they're trying to appear normal, and in New Orleans, we just don't bother with that.

I think you will find me to be a typical middle-class American.

If I dyed my hair, my mother would actually disown me.

A saint is a person who behaves decently in a shockingly indecent society.

Who's to say what's better or worse anyway? Who's to even say what's normal or average? We're all different people and we're allowed to be different from on another. If someone ever says you're weird, say thank you. And then curtsy. No, don't curtsy. That might be too weird. Bow. And tip your imaginary hate. That'll show them.

I have a great need to learn what the norm is by dealing with what is not the norm... with the grotesque and the fantastic.

That is the one unforgivable sin in any society. Be different and be damned!

I got tired of doing battle with people thinking I was a little weird because I wasn't in a band making happy, stilted music. The only people who really seem weird to me are people who think they're normal. People who think it's possible to be normal just by doing the same things that most people do. Is there a most people? I don't know. Television makes it seem like there is, but I think that might just be television.

So, "normal" is really what society dictates as normal and if we're born in that world, we would see that as normal. But if you think about it for a second, is it really?

It takes far more courage to violate a custom than a law.

In the 1950s that tug-of-war between the expectations of behaving normally and the limitlessness of thinking freely produces some very strange characters.

Conformity to a sick society is to be sick.

The fact that we represented freedom, you know. We talked about that in the songs and I think that the parents, like all parents, they want their kids to be in line and not go crazy or do anything too weird (laughs). And for some reason, I think, people identified The Doors as representing just being able to do whatever you wanted to do.

It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness.

In America many things that are interesting are seen as odd.

If you want to be different nowadays, just act normal.

No one was normal, not really.

I'm not extra sensitive to handshakes. I shake hands all the time.

In an age of relativism, orthodoxy is the only possible rebellion left

The fact was, by the time she got to high school, being weird and proud of it was an asset. Suddenly cool, Blue could've happily had any number of friends. And she had tried. But the problem with being weird was that everyone else was 'normal'".

... it is a great mistake to confuse conventionality with simplicity ... it takes a good deal of intelligence and a great many inhibitions to follow a social code.

Perhaps what you call conventionality, I call decency.