Lawrence Kohlberg Quotes

In traditional Hindu families like ours, men provided and women were provided for. My father was a patriarch and I a pliant daughter. The neighborhood I'd grown up in was homogeneously Hindu, Bengali-speaking, and middle-class. I didn't expect myself to ever disobey or disappoint my father by setting my own goals and taking charge of my future.

We are citizens of an age, as well as of a State; and if it is held to be unseemly, or even inadmissible, for a man to cut himself off from the customs and manners of the circle in which he lives, why should it be less of a duty, in the choice of his activity, to submit his decision to the needs and the taste of his century?

It's the community that helps form our moral compass. It's those attitudes that I've remembered through my entire lifetime.

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.

Do you know what we are those of us who count as pillars of society? We are society's tools, neither more nor less.

School has never really been about individualized learning, but about how to be socialized as a citizen and as a human being, so that we, we have important rules in school, always emphasizing the fact that one is part of a group.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

I believe people think as a group more often than we might realize or care to admit. We like to believe that we act as individuals and nothing more, but time and again - in corporations and business, in politics and religion, in fashion and culture, and in friendships and social circles - we think and do as one.

I didn't grow up with any concept of people being deviants unless they mistreated others.

We're talking about everybody's free right to have choice. And so what we're also getting are interesting messages like you really need to obey the command of Allah and put a scarf on your head. And what we caution well-intentioned Americans and others to think about is whether the scarf matches their own values related to issues of honor and shame.

The purity of Jewish upbringing - the restrictions that one carries through life being a 'nice Jewish girl' - what a burden.

Culture is everything you don't have to do.

National character cannot be built by law. It is the sum of the moral fiber of its individuals.

Privacy is not really a concept in Japan.

I never quite lived up to the image of the black man as I saw it growing up. I was never listening to the right music at the right time or wearing the right clothes at the right time. I was still listening to Michael Jackson, and everyone had sort of moved on to gangster rap. Alanis Morissette when everyone else was listening to En Vogue.

I asked my mother, 'Why shouldn't I act?' She said, 'Nobody in the family has acted, so why should you?'

I was a big girl considering herself beautiful, which is in conservative Israel had never been seen.

We used to wear a track suit and T-shirt while training. But that did not go down well with the villagers, because women are usually supposed to wear salwar kameez.

We're supposed to be civilized. We're supposed to go to work every day. We're supposed to be nice to our friends and send Christmas cards to our parents.

It was fashionable, youre supposed to be a married lady, so I did.

Conformity is the ape of harmony.

There are conservative values where certain lifestyles are imposed and everybody should have 2.4 children and a dog and a cat and a house and you should feel like God and you should believe in God and you should be a capitalist. I don't buy any of that.

I thought grandmothers had to like you. It’s a law or something.

Can any man or woman choose duties? No more than they can choose their birthplace or their father and mother.