Terence Quotes

Custom has furnished the only basis which ethics have ever had.

This could never be a crime in any society which deems itself enlightened.

What is morality but immemorial custom? Conscience is the chief of conservatives.

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

There is no conceivable human action which custom has not at one time justified and at another condemned.

Morality makes stupid.- Custom represents the experiences of men of earlier times as to what they supposed useful and harmful - but the sense for custom (morality) applies, not to these experiences as such, but to the age, the sanctity, the indiscussability of the custom. And so this feeling is a hindrance to the acquisition of new experiences and the correction of customs: that is to say, morality is a hindrance to the development of new and better customs: it makes stupid.

In most old communities there is a common sense even in sensuality. Vice itself gets gradually digested into a system, is amenable to certain laws of conventional propriety and honor, has for its object simply the gratification of its appetites, and frowns with quite a conservative air on all new inventions, all untried experiments in iniquity.

Montaigne is wrong in declaring that custom ought to be followed simply because it is custom, and not because it is reasonable or just.

Laws and customs may be creative of vice; and should be therefore perpetually under process of observation and correction: but laws and customs cannot be creative of virtue: they may encourage and help to preserve it; but they cannot originate it.

What is right is not always popular.

It is true that legality is not morality, and sticking to the law is necessary for good citizenship, but it is not sufficient.

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

Conventionality is not morality.

We delude ourselves into believing that morality comes from somewhere else, whereas in reality we behave as we've been told to behave.

Moralities, ethics, laws, customs, beliefs, doctrines - these are of trifling import. All that matters is that the miraculous become the norm.

I always tried to be correct, not politically correct.

In civilized life, law floats in a sea of ethics.

It ain't no sin if you crack a few laws now and then, just so long as you don't break any.

It's very much simpler to get rid of any written rule you choose than it is an item of customary morality... while laws are preserved on tablets of wood or stone, customary morality is engraved deep in our living souls

Equality is the measure of all things, and bad behavior is less bad if everyone indulges in it.

Where a bad custom has been in existence for any length of time, most people grow to regard it as part of the order of nature.

Customs do not concern themselves with right or wrong or reason. But they have to be obeyed; one reasons all around them until he is tired, but he must not transgress them, it is sternly forbidden.

… a country's laws are written upon paper, and that its customs are engraved upon brass. One may play with the one, but not with the other. It is less risky for a stranger to dance upon our Constitution in the public square than to affront one of our solidified customs. The one is merely eminently respectable, the other is sacred.

We respect law, when the law respects our needs. Whenever legality clashes with morality, legality should be opposed and morality should be upheld.

The empire of custom is most mighty.