John Morgridge Quotes

Society becomes how we behave.

Just as the earth is a planet in its own right, so each of us is an individual in our own sphere of habitation. We are individuals, but we live in families and communities where order provides a system of harmony that hinges on obedience to principles.

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

At this level, the individual perceives the maintenance of the expectations of his family, group, or nation as valuable in its own right, regardless of immediate and obvious consequences.

We do not just blindly concede control to authorities; instead we follow the cues provided by our moral communities on how best to behave.

I am a person who is inclined to define relations between individuals based on principles.

Men, who are rogues individually, are in the mass very honorable people.

I think your values are always influenced by your family and your community.

Time is found in the calibration of the individual to the timing of a collective endeavour, the social grace that less clock-bound societies must practise.

As states we act, in general, and in most cases, exactly like the individuals of whom our society is composed.

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.

the more our societies grow, the more important trust becomes and the harder it is to build. And that is a paradox of modern societies.

Public opinion alone can keep a society pure and healthy.

Walls, towns, rules, and day-to-day life doesn't make us civilized ... That's organization and ritual. Civilization lives in our hearts and heads or it doesn't exist at all.

Conscience is the guardian in the individual of the rules which the community has evolved for its own preservation.

For as laws are necessary that good manners be preserved, so there is need of good manners that law may be maintained.

I feel like young people, more than anyone in the country, always have their moral compass on perfectly straight.

American life is based on a reassurance that we like one another but won't violate one another's privacies. This makes it a land of small talk.

We engage in the public institutions of work and school and club and team, because it is there that we find meaning and purpose. But sometimes when we engage, we find confrontation not affirmation.

In general, in more collectivist cultures, we see that in group settings, people dampen their emotions but are very expressive when they are at home alone. In more individualistic cultures, such as North America and Europe, it's the opposite - people are more expressive in group settings than when they are by themselves.

Primates are really well designed to see who is not keeping up their end of the deal.

People influence each other, so one screening will be filled with laughs while another is dead silent.

There are basic lines of human decency, norms to which society generally agrees and to which we adhere, and we continue to see the Trump presidency eroding these lines.

Humans are the only ones who are the custodians of other people's morals.

None of us get to divorce ourselves from the world. We walk into the theater and bring all of our grief and our pain and our joy with us.