Edwin Percy Whipple Quotes

How many things both just and unjust are sanctioned by custom?

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

What used to be considered conservative values... are increasingly becoming more mainstream values.

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.

Most conduct is guided by norms rather than by laws. Norms are voluntary and are effective because they are enforced by peer pressure.

Manners are the root, laws only the trunk and branches. Manners are the archetypes of laws. Manners are laws in their infancy; laws are manners fully grown,--or, manners are children, which, when they grow up, become laws.

Justice is a moral virtue, merely because it has that tendency to the good of mankind, and indeed is nothing but an artificial invention to that purpose. The same may be said of allegiance, of the laws of nations, of modesty, and of good manners. All these are mere human contrivances for the interest of society.

How powerful social mores are! Only a spider's web lies across the volcano, yet it refrains from erupting.

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

I am just the most boring person you will ever meet. I'm the good Southern daughter. I'm not outrageous.

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?

I grew up in a conservative household. That was the life of the time in Egypt: a conservative, middle-class household.

None of my sisters are in the movies, nor are my nieces going to be. That's how Dutt 'sahab,' my dad, brought up the girls in the family, and I am just carrying his thought forward.

Social conservatives say who drives the bus.

But we're still in somewhat a Puritanical society in a lot of ways.

No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.

An attack on values is inevitably seen as an act of subversion.

The primary function of myth is to validate an existing social order. Myth enshrines conservative social values, raising tradition on a pedestal. It expresses and confirms, rather than explains or questions, the sources of cultural attitudes and values.

There are the rules and then there are the ways.

Major religions usually remain major because they sanctify whatever is the social stricture of the day.

I don't think morality can be decided on the private level. I think you need public guidance and public support for a moral consensus. The average person has to know instinctively, without thinking too much about it, how he should raise his children.

… 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.

One of my goals in life is to watch political correctness shrivel up and die (as it should be for any true conservative).

All that is good is not embodied in the law; and all that is evil is not proscribed by the law. A well-disciplined society needs few laws; but it needs strong mores.