Edward Gibbon Quotes

Custom ... changes the very nature of things; and what was honorable a thousand years ago, may probably be looked upon as infamous now.

My mother would kill me if I posed nude! My mother raised me with certain standards.

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

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

In America nothing dies easier than tradition.

We are often deterred from crime by the disgrace of others.

When cultural change succeeds, it succeeds because it's so embedded in what we do that we don't have to think about.

When a woman removes her garment, she also removes the respect that is hers.

Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.

As a society, I think we express our cultural mores through our politics. We're trying constantly to figure out what's OK and what's not OK. And it's hard, because our society is constantly buffeted by gale force winds of technology. Things are always changing.

We have defined decency down.

You just never know when today's cultural outcasts will become tomorrow's cultural icons.

Honor to a Spaniard, no matter how dishonest, is as real a thing as water, wine, or olive oil. There is honor among pickpockets and honor among whores. It is simply that the standards differ.

I think culture is a very challenging thing to reverse.

I like to think about society as being a flock of birds: There seems to be a common consciousness in different time periods, and the new common consciousness reacts to the old standards.

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.

Culture is a product of law. And laws create norms for society. This is why anyone who wants to change the culture of a country must try to change the norms of the country.

It's really interesting because 50 years ago, if you didn't wear a hat everyone looked at you. It just proves that everything is fashion.

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.

The most important 'speed' issue is often not technical but cultural. It's convincing everyone that the company's survival depends on everyone moving as fast as possible.

The high-minded man is fond of conferring benefits, but it shames him to receive them.

A culture that holds people back should and can be changed.

Our inheritance of well-founded, slowly conceived codes of honor, morals and manners, the passionate convictions which so many hundreds of millions share together of the principles of freedom and justice, are far more precious to us than anything which scientific discoveries could bestow.

People who want to wage cultural wars ought to keep in mind that cultural views often don't move at all for a very long time, but when they move they can move very fast.

Society is no more indulgent than was the God of Genesis.