Mary Augusta Ward Quotes

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.

All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by. religion, whatever else it has done, has provided one of the main ways of meeting this abiding need.

Everybody is a hypocrite. You can't live on this planet without being a hypocrite.

A little hypocrisy is better than losing.

There's a gigantic gray area between good moral behavior and outright felonious activities. I call that the Weasel Zone and it's where most of life happens.

No convention gets to be a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful people first inventing it, and then imposing it on others. You can be pretty sure, if you are strictly conventional, that you are following genius--a long way off. And unless you are a genius yourself, that is a good thing to do.

But what really is immorality? And what does helping someone really mean? Helping them to be like everyone else, or helping them to be themselves?

All of us have to be prevaricators, hypocrites, and liars every day of our lives; otherwise the social structure would fall into pieces the first day. We must act in one another's presence just as we must wear clothes. It is for the best

Long ago, among other lies they were taught that silence was bravery.

As the eye becomes blinded by fashion to positive deformity, so, through social conventionalism, the conscience becomes blinded to positive immorality.

Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs.

Education should not be fun. You are being brought up into society and society has a way of doing things. It may not be pleasant but sooner or later you are going to have to do it anyway.

Custom may lead a man into many errors; but it justifies none.

Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically - for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist - but then what isn't?

It is generally understood that men don't aspire after the absolute right, but only to do about as well as the rest of the world.

I want to know why, if men rule the world, they don't stop wearing neckties.

Those who live not by law would be justified by Custom: but, as common practice is the worst teacher that ever was, so the truth and goodness of things is not to be estimated by the entertainment and acceptance they find in the world.

Civilization means conforming to a standard of behavior that may not seem natural to us.

It is better to preach five words of God’s Word than five million words of man’s wisdom.

Custom is almost a second nature.

Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?

People have to live by rules in the world. Why do we pretend in school that they don't?

Myth, legend, and ritual ... function to maintain a status quo. That makes them singularly bad in coping with change, indeed counterproductive, for change is the enemy of myth.

Good and bad may not be dissevered; There is, as there should be, a commingling.