Jasper Fforde Quotes

A hundred years ago Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter was given an A for adultery; today she would rate no better than a C-plus.

As times change, so do the way each generation see the world. It is rather like the way our generation came to see our grandparents' views on the Empire and colonies as outdated.

A cultural shift is not always an ideological one - or at least not always the one you imagine. Our norms are always evolving.

History requires us to judge the figures of the past not by our moral standards but by those of the ages in which they lived and worked.

It would have saved trouble had I remained Perkins from the first, this changing of women's names is a nuisance we are now happily outgrowing.

People drift from generation to generation, and the morally unthinkable becomes thinkable as the years move on.

In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. Now, Heaven knows, anything goes. The world has gone mad today, and good's bad today, and black's white today, and day's night today.

It is hardly respectable to be good nowadays.

Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved.

Life used to be a rite of passage in and of itself. But it's not our parents' generation anymore.

These youngsters hold that all morality is relative but that middle class morality is just plain bad.

We are becoming a society where traditional values and free speech are being diminished and the religious are viewed as having a backward mentality.

Politics is downstream from culture.

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

For some strange reason murder has always seemed more respectable than fornication. Few people are shocked when they hear God described as the God of Battles; but what an outcry there would be if anyone spoke of him as the God of Brothels.

There is no possible line of conduct which has at some time and place been condemned, and which has not at some other time and place been enjoined as a duty.

Multiculturalism is a good reminder that when standards are relative, there are no standards at all.

I like to think about society as being a flock of birds: There seems to be a common consciousness in different time periods, and the new common consciousness reacts to the old standards.

No one in Germany laughs at vice, nor do they call it the fashion to corrupt and to be corrupted.

To those who say Ted Bundy should burn forever in eternity I would only say, so should I, so should all of us.

For that which all men then did virtue call, Is now called vice; and that which vice was hight, Is now hight virtue, and so used of all: Right now is wrong, and wrong that was is right

What were once vices are the fashion of the day.

You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.

Things that would shock us years ago are like nothing now.

Tolerance is a virtue, but like all virtues, when exaggerated, it transforms itself into a vice. We need to be careful of the “tolerance trap” so that we are not swallowed up in it. The permissiveness afforded by the weakening of the laws of the land to tolerate legalized acts of immorality does not reduce the serious spiritual consequence that is the result of the violation of God’s law of chastity.