Henry Steele Commager Quotes

... consensus on social values is determined less and less by demographic factors.

When any significant change takes place in the moral standards of a community, it is immediately reflected in a general shifting of the meanings of common words.

I go out into America, and I am literally navigating a minefield. Godliness has become abnormal.

Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth century society up to about 1970 and then it almost bypassed the twentieth century.

The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.

We have defined decency down.

No important institution is ever merely what the law makes it. It accumulates about itself traditions, conventions, ways of behavior, which ... are not less formidable in their influence.

Morals are three-quarters manners.

It is remarkable how great an influence our clothes have on our moral state.

When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals.

No one asks public men to be strictly moral, but they must seem to be well-behaved.

Do you know what morals are? Morals are an obedience to rules that people laid down to help you live among them.

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.

Moral standards cannot be changed by battle and cannot be changed by ballot.

It was no longer esteemed infamous for a Roman to survive his honor and independence.

We now live in a culture of the temporary, in which more and more people are simply giving up on marriage as a public commitment.

This party spirit has so ill an effect on our morals, it has likewise a very great one upon our judgments.

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.

Your mothers get mighty shocked at you girls nowadays, but in her day, her mother was just on the verge of sending her to reform school.

Nudity is a problem for Americans. It disrupts our social exchange.

I think religion might throw up a kind of resistance, but I think if one talks about conditioning we can all kind of understand that.

Quite often in history action has been the echo of words. An era of talk was followed by an era of events. The new barbarism of the twentieth century is the echo of words bandied about by brilliant speakers and writers in the second half of the nineteenth.

The social problem of the twentieth century is whether civilized nations can restore themselves to sanity after their nineteenth-century aberrations of individualism and capitalism.

For Europeans a president having an affair, especially in France, is a joke. No one cares, it would never bring this kind of trouble to a country.

People who commit adultery must die. Everyone knows that. Any movie tells you that!