George Leonard Quotes

When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.

Ancient Egyptians went to great lengths to avoid change; they couldn't entirely do so, of course, but did preserve a cultural continuity for almost four thousand years.

First of all, whoever didn't want to be a member of this association or the other association, was branded, you know, like a dangerous individualist, you know, infected by the Western decadence, you know. So everybody joined.

Young people in my generation were sort of in lockstep, and it wasn't just the '40s, either. In the '30s and in the '50s it was the same. No one ever dropped out unless he got sick or got kicked out.

Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.

People are going to behave however the social norms permit, and beyond that.

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

The whole system of society tells you what to do.

We all just kinda did everything we thought we were supposed to do and girls dated the guys they were supposed to and did things with the guys they were supposed to.

I warn against the tyranny of the majority of the people with good table manners.

Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed.

One of the unpardonable sins, in the eyes of most people, is for a man to go about unlabeled. The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog, not under proper control.

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.

Tradition is nothing but ancestral peer pressure.

How can we choose to selectively follow what we find comfortable and attack anybody who tries to break free from the norms that we choose to set?

That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality.

Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid.

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

To death we owe our life; the passing of one generation opens a way for another.

School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.

Sometimes tradition is a way of keeping going.

The whole intelectual culture has a filtering system, starts as a child in school. You're expected to accept certain beliefs, styles, behavioral patterns and so on. If you don't accept them, you are called maybe a behavioral problem, or something, and you're weeded out. Something like that goes on all the way through universities and graduate schools. There is an implicit system of filtering, which has the, it creates a strong tendency to impose conformism. Now, it's a tendency, so you do have exceptions, and sometimes the exceptions are quite striking.

Certainly in each social period, youth must be made to venerate the dominant absurdities.

It is difficult to escape from the prevailing disease of one's generation.

We arrange our lives-even the best and boldest men and women that exist, just as much as the most limited-with reference to what society conventionally rules and makes right.