Charlotte Lennox 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.

A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law.

That which an age considers evil is usually an unseasonable echo of what was formerly considered good - the atavism of an old ideal.

What's vice today may be virtue, tomorrow.

There are thus great swathes of the past where understanding is more important and reputable than judgement, because the principal actors performed in line with the ideas and values of that time, not of ours.

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.

I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours.

Change often makes accepted customs into crimes.

The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

If enough people openly engage in conduct once considered reprehensible, we rewrite the rule book and assume that God, as a good democrat, will go along.

Life is not better and more moral than it was in the '50s. It's just the same.

Things change so fast, you can't use 1971 ethics on someone born in 1971.

Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.

Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

Each generation confronts new problems, encounters new facts, and tells our history somewhat differently.

Nevertheless, during the sixty years of the twentieth century many problems have come increasingly into the realm of acceptable public discussion.

Taste for things of the past evolves, doesn't it? What was a masterpiece a hundred years ago is no longer so today.

What were once vices are the fashion of the day.

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.

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 often happens that the universal belief of one age of mankind — a belief from which no one was, nor without an extraordinary effort of genius and courage, could at that time be free — becomes to a subsequent age so palpable an absurdity, that the only difficulty then is to imagine how such a thing can ever have appeared credible.