William Kingdon Clifford Quotes

I'm not being secretive about anything. I just actually don't have opinions about society.

The whole system of society tells you what to do.

In civilized life, where the happiness and indeed almost the existence of man, depends on the opinion of his fellow men. He is constantly acting a studied part.

In some extremely important ways, people are what you expect them to be, or at least they behave as you expect them to behave.

Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in.

I have bursts of being a lady, but it doesn't last long.

What used to be called 'good manners' is now regarded as mere affectation. Open a door for a young woman, and she's likely to call security.

It’s all right that you do not understand my Theory of Relativity. I do not understand your Theory of Normalcy.

Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.

Public opinion is no more than this. What people think that other people think.

A man must know how to act in the face of opinion; a woman to submit to it.

The world is governed much more by opinion than by laws. It is not the judgment of courts, but the moral judgment of individuals and masses of men, which is the wall of defense around property and life.

The structure of society throughout the world has been created by individuals

Public opinion is the atmosphere of society, without which the forces of the individual would collapse, and all the institutions of society fly into atoms.

We are strange beings, we seem to go free, but we go in chains--chains of training, custom, convention, association, environment--in a word, Circumstance--and against these bonds the strongest of us struggle in vain.

In America there is not one single element of civilization that is not made to depend, in the end, upon public opinion.

No one can escape the influence of a prevailing ideology.

Society becomes how we behave.

If I try and be something I am not, if I try and be cool, and I am not, I am a boring white man in a suit. Usually a pin-striped suit.

I think people are a little surprised sometimes at the level on which I actually talk. I don't talk like Caine. And every once in a while, somebody is surprised because I smoke and I drink. But I don't feel that is a contradiction.

Peer pressure is a huge part of youth behavior, whether one grows up in Washington, D.C., or Cody, Wyo.

I know ideals aren't realities, but they do influence reality - social, legal, political, cultural.

We're all functions of our societies, right? And we all become who we are because of the invisible forces that mold us.

I just feel like in society and in public, we have this unspoken expectation that we're all trying to meet. And there's so much pressure to try to fit in.

What people will - or will not - laugh at is mainly determined by their social conditioning.