Napoleon Bonaparte Quotes

There is nothing so extreme that is not allowed by the custom of some nation or other.

And we had our own laws. I mean, I wrote them. And we had our own customs, and traditions, and proprieties.

A man who goes into a country must comply with the ceremonies in use there.

Civilization is a network and a maze of precedences and custom.

To me, I learned along the way, you know, culture is behavior. That's all it is; culture is people's behaviors.

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

Nothing seems at first sight less important than the outward form of human actions, yet there is nothing upon which men set more store: they grow used to everything except to living in a society which has not their own manners.

You'd go to a Pakistani party and the men and women would go in at the front door and the women would go to the right and the men would go to the left, and that was the last that we'd see of them until we were coming home.

All ladies arriving here as strangers it seems expect to be visited by the wives of the heads of the departments and even by the President’s wife. Mrs. Madison subjected herself to this torture, … but from which having begun the practice, she never found an opportunity of receding from.

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.

… 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.

If you ask a Saudi Imam why women in Saudi Arabia can't drive, he'll say, 'Because Islam demands it.' But that's absurd, because - first of all - Islam demands no such thing; and secondly, the only country in the world in which women can't drive is Saudi Arabia. The inability to understand the difference between a cultural practice and religious belief is shocking among self-described intellectuals.

Ceremonies are the outworks of manners.

Customs are made for customary circumstances, and customary characters.

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.

Customs represent the experience of mankind.

Traditions are neither good nor bad, they simply are... Rationality is not an arbiter of traditions, it is itself a tradition or an aspect of a tradition.

Our customs, behaviors, and values are byproducts of our culture.

Not greeting people isn't enough. One also doesn't greet people one doesn't know.

What men call civilization is the condition of present customs; what they call barbarism, the condition of past ones.

Anything you make forbidden gains sexual attractiveness. Would you be particularly interested in women's breasts if you lived in a society in which they were displayed at all times?

It's now very common to hear people say 'I'm rather offended by that'.

In civilized communities men's idiosyncrasies are mitigated by the necessity of conforming to certain rules of behavior. Culture is a mask that hides their faces.

Culture is your operating system.

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